Anku Rani is a doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab, where she works at the intersection of multimodal AI and Human-Computer Interaction. Her research focuses on breaking health-related socio-cultural myths by developing technologies that make medical information culturally resonant for remote Indian villages.

Prior to MIT, Anku conducted research at Adobe Research on visual language models and mathematical reasoning, and at the University of South Carolina’s Artificial Intelligence Institute, where she focused on fact verification. Her work has been published in leading conferences, and she actively contributes to the academic community through conference reviews (ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, LREC, COLING, NAACL), workshop organization (AAAI’23, AAAI’24), and program committee service. She is a two-time AAAI scholarship recipient (2023, 2024).

Before moving to the US, Anku worked as a research scientist with a health tech startup and as a Machine Learning Engineer at an edtech startup. She has also served as a Data Scientist at Verisk Analytics, a US-based InsurTech company, following her postgraduate studies in AI and ML from Plaksha University. Throughout her career, she has consulted for universities, startups, and government organizations.

Brief Project Description: Anku’s research addresses a critical public health challenge: how to replace dangerous traditional remedies with accurate medical information in Indian communities. She develops AI technologies that adapt medical advice to be culturally appropriate and linguistically accessible for rural Indian villages, using multimodal approaches that modify language, speech, and gestures to ensure health information resonates with local communities