Priyanka Verma, a graduate student with dark hair and a purple jacket, stands in fornt of a mountainous backdrop

Priyanka Verma

Doctoral Candidate
Faculty of Information

Priyanka is a third-year doctoral student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research investigates and seeks to reimagine the role of data and information technologies in supporting the goals of cooperatives. Her work integrates computational and statistical techniques, qualitative interpretive methods, and design-based frameworks. Her work has been supported by Sustainable Development Goals Student Awards, School of Cities Graduate Fellowship and Munk School of Public Policy scholarships at UofT. She has previously worked as a software developer at Oracle India. Her prior academic training is in computer science and economics from BITS Pilani, India.

Supervisor
Samar Sabie

Education
M.Sc. (Hons.) Economics BITS Pilani, India
B.E. (Hons.) Computer Science BITS Pilani, India

Publications

  • Maintenance, Operations, and Sustainability: Unpacking the Data Practices of Housing Cooperatives. 2025. Priyanka Verma, Mohammad R. Rifat, Samar Sabie. CHI ’25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
  • Priyanka Verma and Sameer Patil. 2021. Exploring Privacy Aspects of Smartphone Notifications. In 23rd International Conference on Mobile Human‑Computer Interaction (MobileHCI).
  • Priyanka Verma, Ananya Saxena, Alok Sharma, William Thies, and Devansh Mehta. 2021. Demo: A WhatsApp Bot for Citizen Journalism in Rural India. In ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS).

Research

My research investigates and seeks to reimagine the role of data tools and information systems in supporting the goals and values of cooperative communities. I am currently investigating technology-mediated financial decision making, such as budgeting practices, for democratic and fair division of resources within housing cooperatives. By critically uncovering the role of technology in building capacity and infrastructure through data practices, my work aims to make Toronto’s housing cooperatives - and beyond - more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient in the long term.

Other

Specialization
Data Practices
Responsible Algorithms
Housing Cooperatives
Tech for Financial Practices