Portrait of Ritika Pandey

Ritika Pandey

Applied ML / NLP Research Scientist

Boston, MA

My research lies at the intersection of machine learning, network analysis, and natural language processing, aimed at social harm and criminal justice applications. As a Research Associate Professor at Boston College School of Social Work, I lead technical development on the Gateway Initiative, a partnership with the school and Massachusetts’s Gateway Cities to build dashboards and analytical tools from publicly available data for community and government partners.

Education

2020–2023 Ph.D., Computer Science Purdue University · Indianapolis, IN
Advisors: Dr. George Mohler, Dr. James Hill Dissertation: “Rewiring police officer training networks to reduce forecasted use of force”
2018–2020 M.S., Computer & Information Science Purdue University · Indianapolis, IN
Advisor: Dr. George MohlerThesis: “Text mining for social harm and criminal justice applications”
2013–2017 B.Tech., Computer Science & Engineering Uttarakhand Technical University · Dwarahat, India

Experience

July 2025–present Research Associate Professor Boston College, School of Social Work · Chestnut Hill, MA
Oct 2023–June 2025 Research Assistant Professor Boston College, School of Social Work · Chestnut Hill, MA
Feb 2018–Aug 2023 Research Assistant, Machine Learning Purdue University · Indianapolis, IN
Summer 2022
Summer 2021 Data Science Intern, R&D Roche Diabetes Care · Indianapolis, IN
Summer 2019 IT Intern, Data Analytics Navient Inc. · Fishers, IN

Teaching

Fall 2025
Fall 2026 Adjunct Professor Messina College, Boston College · Brookline, MA
MCCS 1137, Introduction to R for Data Science
2018–2022 Teaching Assistant Purdue University · Indianapolis, IN
CSCI 54900 Intelligent Systems (Fall 2019, Fall 2021) · CSCI 44300 Database Systems (Fall 2022) · CSCI 48900 Data Science (Spring 2019) · CSCI 36300 Principles of Software Design (Fall 2019) · CSCI 36200 Data Structures (Fall 2018)

Publications

KDD ’23

R. Pandey, J. Carter, J. Hill, G. Mohler. “Rewiring police officer training networks to reduce forecasted use of force.” ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, 2023. doi.org/10.1145/3580305.3599899

ICDMW 2020

R. Pandey, P.J. Brantingham, C.D. Uchida, G. Mohler. “Building knowledge graphs of homicide investigation chronologies.” IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, Sorrento, Italy, 2020. doi.org/10.1109/ICDMW51313.2020.00115

KDD ’19

J. Lu, S. Sridhar, R. Pandey, M. Al Hasan, G. Mohler. “Investigating transitions into drug addiction through text mining of Reddit data.” Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, 2019. doi.org/10.1145/3292500.3330737

IEEE Big Data 2018

J. Lu, S. Sridhar, R. Pandey, M. Al Hasan, G. Mohler. “Redditors in recovery: text mining Reddit to investigate transitions into drug addiction.” IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 2018. arXiv:1903.04081

IEEE ISI 2018

R. Pandey, G. Mohler. “Evaluation of crime topic models: topic coherence vs. spatial crime concentration.” IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Miami, FL, 2018. doi.org/10.1109/ISI.2018.8587384