Madhura Pawar
ELLIS PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam
I am an ELLIS PhD Candidate in the Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems Group at the University of Amsterdam. My research focuses on fairness, cooperation, and collective action in evolving social networks, as part of the ERC-funded RE-LINK project. I develop computational models for responsible link recommendation algorithms that promote socially desirable outcomes while maintaining user engagement. By analyzing trade-offs between social mechanisms and recommendation utility, I aim to identify conditions under which fair and socially responsible network dynamics emerge.
Prior to my PhD, I obtained my Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence (Cum Laude) from the University of Amsterdam in 2024. Before that, I worked for three years as a software engineer: first as a full-stack developer at Credit Suisse and later as a backend developer at KlearStack. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology in 2019.
news
| Nov 27, 2025 | Gave a short talk on ongoing research as part of the research showcase to BSc Computational Social Science students. |
|---|---|
| Jan 1, 2025 | Serving as a reviewer for Journal of Complex Networks (2025) and ICWSM 2026 (AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media). |
| Sep 1, 2024 | Started my PhD at the University of Amsterdam as an ELLIS PhD Candidate in the Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems Group, working on the ERC-funded RE-LINK project. |
| Jul 1, 2024 | Our paper “Improving Centrality Fairness in Algorithmic Link Recommendations” was accepted at the Humans, Algorithmic Decision-Making and Society Workshop at ICML 2024. We also presented a poster of this work at NetSci 2025. |
| Dec 1, 2023 | Our reproducibility study “[Re] Reproducibility Study of ‘Label-Free Explainability for Unsupervised Models’” was accepted at the ML Reproducibility Challenge 2022 and presented at NeurIPS 2023. [Paper, Code] |