Ananya Gurumurthy, a senior at MIT, combines her data from musical abilities with her math and computer science degrees to advocate for the use of statistics for social change.

Gone are the days of bringing justice only through strikes and processions. The new age demands novel ways to challenge injustice, and this MIT student has paved the way for a brand-new technique using data from AI and academics to challenge the contemporary style.

Ananya’s awakening

Senior Ananya Gurumurthy, a three-year recipient of MIT’s Emerson Classical Vocal Scholarships, remembers getting ready to take the stage at Carnegie Hall to sing a Mozart opera sung by her in the All-State Choir of New York. The choir leader advised her to enunciate her sentences and use her diaphragm.

“Will the people really pay any heed if you are unable to project your voice whenever you execute?” Gurumurthy recalls her conductor telling her this. “This is your chance to connect with such a huge audience.” Gurumurthy thinks about the universal validity of those statements as she combines her musical abilities with her math and computer science degrees to push for social and economic fairness.

An immigrant’s daughter

Her South Asian immigrant parents, who arrived in the United States in the 1980s, motivated her to fight for others as she grew up in Edgemont, New York. Her father works as a management consultant, while her mother formerly worked as an investment banker.

“Their arrival was only after 15 years of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished national origin quotas in the American immigration system,” she explains. “I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for the Civil Rights Movement, which paved the way for my family. “Her parents informed her about the anti-immigrant feelings in their new neighborhood; for example, her father was a PhD student in Dallas and was entering a store when he was showered with glass bottles along with racial slurs.

“I frequently reflect on how brave they must have been to leave all they knew behind and immigrate to a new, yet still imperfect, country in quest of something better,” she says. “As a result, I’ve always felt deeply rooted in my identity as a South Asian American and a woman of color, which has enabled me to critically consider how I can most successfully improve the systems that surround me.”

Gurumurthy has been singing since she was 11 years old, but she chose to sharpen her political abilities in high school by interning for New York Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Gurumurthy had stated that a log was kept for constituent call themes such as “affordable housing” and “infrastructure.”

Her research and student life at MIT

She admits that when she arrived at MIT in 2019 to study mathematics with computer science data and minors in music and economics, she had the naive expectation that she would “build digital subjects’ data that would vehemently cure all injustice in the economy of the country.”

She has since learned to build what she refers to as “a more nuanced view.” She learned data analytics skills while working in Fulton County, Georgia, with Fair Fight Action (via the Kelly-Douglas Fund Scholarship) to analyze patterns of voter suppression and at MIT’s ethics department to construct symbolic artificial intelligence in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labs to better grasp the systemic bias in AI.

The article “The Rapid Rise of Cryptocurrency” that Ananya wrote for the International Monetary Fund took second place in the 2022 S. Klein Prize in Technical Writing. Ananya intends to attend law school after graduation in order to use her technological experience to construct quantitative evidence in instances involving voting rights, social welfare, and ethical technology, as well as to set legal norms “for the humane use of data,” she adds.

“By creating digital tools for a variety of social and economic justice organizations, I hope to challenge our current power structures and see the progress we so desperately need to see,” the author says” Both algorithmically and organizationally, there is strength in numbers. According to her, it is “our collective responsibility as individuals to learn the skills of incoherence to better the world.”