NAME
Drshika Asher (she/they)
SYNOPSIS
Industry:
NCSA [Research SWE][2024]
MongoDB [SWE Intern][2023]
Uber [SWE Intern][2023]
Cargill [SWE Intern][2022]
EnterpriseWorks [Front-End Intern][2021]
Education: UIUC, B.S. Computer Science [2024]
Research:
Microsoft Research Redmond [Undergrad Research Intern][2022]
Social CompUting LaBoratory (SCUBA) [Research Intern][2021][2022]
Human Computer Interaction Lab [Research Intern][2022]
DESCRIPTION
Hey, I’m Drshika! I recently graduated from UIUC and moved to New York. Currently, I’m a Research Software Engineer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois and the city holds such a special place in my heart that I have a Spotify playlist dedicated to it.
During college, I was involved with a lot of undergraduate research, head TA-ships (or as the CS department at UIUC calls them, CA-ships) and club leadership. My studies and research were supported by scholarships from JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Cargill, Clare Boothe Luce Foundation and others. To add some spice to my life, I spent my senior year in college interning for Japan House where I whisked countless bowls of matcha and learned to dress in Yukata!
When I’m not coding, you can find me playing trivia with my friends, practicing hindustani classical music, teaching myself to embroider or curating hyper-specific playlists on Spotify.
NEWS
[August, 2024]
I graduated and moved to NYC! Here’s to new beginnings :)
[May, 2024]
I’m super honored to be recognized by the UIUC CS department for my research and scholarship. Learn more here
WRITING
Creating Jekyll Skins with Sass 1.80.0 [January, 2025]
When I first started writing the code for this website, I had cobbled together styles from Cayman, Rouge and a good amount of Coolors to iterate on the color schemes….
What’s on my Mac? [October, 2024]
So, people have been asking me to write this because I have an entire workflow system that I can’t live without. My setup isn’t necessarily complicated or advanced, but I…
Uber Career Prep Fellows [November, 2022]
This past year, I participated in the Uber Career Prep Fellowship, a seven-month program with five virtual workshops ranging in content from technical interview prep to learning about different careers…
RESEARCH
OVER-TRUST IN AUTOMATED SYSTEMS, UIUC HCI LAB [2022]
Mentors: Prof. Alex Kirlik and Sebastian Rodriguez. I worked with the UIUC Human-Computer Interaction lab on a project about embodied agents in the context of trust, performance, and embodiment in a physical VR task. I contributed ideas in terms of shaping experimental design, researched and analyzed papers to the review of literature and helped design the VR game itself by programming in C# and Unity. I also dry ran the experiment with peers until it was ready to execute at a larger scale.
CLASSIFYING AUDIO-SOCIAL PLATFORMS,SCuBa LAB [2021]
Mentors: Prof. Eshwar Chandrashekaran and Tanvi Bajpai. I investigated the structure and norms of the voice based platform Clubhouse and documented the different forms of abuse on voice based platforms like Twitter Spaces, Discord Stages as well as Spotify Greenroom. We analyzed these trends using Natural Language Processing techniques like LDA and SAGE. See my talk from the virtual REU poster session here
PUBLICATIONS
Validating trust in human-robot interaction through virtual reality: Comparing embodied and “behind-the-screen” interactions
Sebastian Rodriguez, Harsh Deep, Drshika Asher, James Schaffer, Alex Kirlik, USA (accepted, AHFE 2023) [arxiv]
Harmonizing the Cacophony: An Affordance-aware Framework of Audio-Based Social Platform Moderation
Tanvi Bajpai, Drshika Asher, Anwesa Goswami, and Eshwar Chandrasekharan
Preprint, July 2021. (accepted, ACM CSCW 2022) [arXiv]
INDUSTRY
MONGODB, Software Engineering Intern [2023]
Database Experience - Rust Driver Team. See my work on Github. [Rust]
UBER, Software Engineering Intern [2023]
Membership Platform Team [Go]
CARGILL, Software Engineering Intern [2022]
Cargill Digital Innovation Lab. [React][TailwindCSS]
ENTERPRISEWORKS, Front-End Developer [2021]
Research Park. [HTML][CSS][JS][PHP]
SERVICE & TEACHING
teaching (* == admin/head course assistant (CA))
CS225: DATA STRUCTURES[SP2022][FA2022*]
Data Structures and Algorithms in C++. With G. Carl Evans and Brad Solomon.
[0] Exam 1 Review Guide
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[1] Exam 2 Review Guide
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[2] Exam 3 Review Guide
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CS196: COMPUTER SCIENCE HONORS [SP2021*][FA2021]
Project Manager & Head of Social.
[0] Kotlin Slides
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service
Girls Who Code [2025]
Setting up a GWC club in Brooklyn NYC in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library.
NCWIT ASPIRATIONS IN COMPUTING REGIONAL ORGANIZER [2022][2023][2024][2025]
Reviewed applications for the NCWIT AiC award and lead the organization of the AiC award Ceremony for the Central Illinois Affiliate for three years. Currently reviewing applications for the NYC Affiliate.
ILLINOIS CS STARS RESEARCH FELLOW [2021-22]
Worked on recruiting, mentorship and cohort-building activities like Hour of Code, ChicTech, Trick or Research and Admitted Women’s outreach.
EXTRAS
[0] I’m in the top .01% of listeners for Chloe X Halle
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[1] I like to build mechanical keyboards! I use the rk68 with gat milky yellows
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[2] My favorite foods are lychee and basil pesto pasta
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[3] My favorite shows are Ted Lasso, Parks and Recreation and Frieren
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[4] Here’s a picture of me!
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