Swapna Thorve


Postdoctoral Researcher

School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia

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Interested in collaborating?

Feel free to reach me at st6ua@virginia.edu if you are interested in collaborating with me on projects related to the application of ML/AI methods in the domains of intelligent systems, sustainability, climate change, and social good.

About me

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Virginia. I currently work with Jon Goodall and Laura Barnes from the School of Engineering and Applied Science on building intelligent infrastructure systems. I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UVA where I was advised by Madhav Marathe and Samarth Swarup at the Biocomplexity Institute. I also hold a Master's degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from Cummins College of Engineering, Pune University. 

My research is at the intersection of fair agent-based modeling & simulation (M&S) and AI/ML for social good. My research broadly focuses on building and working with large-scale systems & synthetic/digital datasets. I have extensive experience in software system design for agent-based simulations and leveraging machine learning methods for learning decision boundaries in social good applications. I also work on developing evaluation metrics for complex digital twin datasets. Currently, I am exploring the areas of explainable and fair AI in the domains of massive agent‑based simulations for sustainability & social impact problems. 

Apart from being a researcher, I am a big fan of coffee. I  am a foodie and I love traveling. I try different types of art from time to time including pottery, painting & dancing.

Recent Updates

Mar 2024: I am honored to be accepted to the Epistimi-ACG-LUCE Summer Leadership Workshop for Women in Energy.

Feb 2024: Recipient of the 2024 Climatebase Fellowship. An industry-oriented program to accelerate careers in solving problems in climate change and sustainability.

Feb 2024: Nominated to be a member of Sigma Xi interdisciplinary scientific honor society – in recognition of scholarly achievements and contributions to the advancement of knowledge in my field of work.

Jan 2024: Our paper 'Assessing fairness of residential dynamic pricing for electricity using active learning with agent-based simulation' is accepted in the upcoming AAMAS 2024 conference.

Aug 2023: Attended the CCAI Summer School 2023.

Aug 2023: Our paper 'A Network Synthesis and Analytics Pipeline with Applications to Sustainable Energy in Smart Grid', is chosen as one of the Best Paper Candidates for the upcoming IEEE eScience 23 conference.

June 2023: My work was featured in the UVA BII news article.

June 2023: Our ACM e-energy paper was highlighted on Kudos.

May 19, 2023: I was selected as a winner of the 2023 National Center for Women & Information Technology Collegiate Award (NCWIT AiC award)  for outstanding accomplishments in computing [link]

May 12, 2023: Our paper Budget-constrained Optimal and Equitable Retrofitting Problems for Achieving Energy Efficiency has been accepted at ACM e-energy 2023