Undergraduate Student Focusing on AI and Fairness Nominated for Prestigious Awards

With several successful AI research projects and published papers already on her resume, Maya De Los Santos, E’25, electrical and computer engineering, who has also served as president of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and completed a co-op at Philips, has been nominated for the prestigious Rhodes, Marshall, Knight-Hennessy, and Churchill Scholarships.
Honors student Maya De Los Santos, E’25, electrical and computer engineering, has been nominated for the top-tier of prestigious student awards, including a Rhodes Scholarship, testimony to her exceptional undergraduate journey at Northeastern, where she is focusing on AI research and its impact on marginalized communities.
Among many accomplishments, De Los Santos participated in a National Science Foundation-funded student research program at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was first-author of a research paper exploring potential privacy risks on the social media platform Tik-Tok. She also conducted research in the Northeastern Civic A.I. Lab as an AJC Merit Research Scholar, which resulted in four papers related to AI’s impact on underrepresented communities and gig workers. De Los Santos presented one of those papers, “Designing Gig Worker Sousveillance Tools,” at the 2024 Computer Human Interaction Conference in Hawaii.
In addition to the Rhodes Scholarship, she was nominated for a Marshall Scholarship, Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, and a Churchill Scholarship. She was also nominated for a Barry Goldwater Scholarship in early 2024.
“I feel very honored to have been nominated for these awards, and I am grateful to all of my mentors for their support and encouragement throughout this process,” De Los Santos says.
Her journey began while attending a magnet high school in New Jersey, where she focused on engineering and computer programming. With faculty encouragement, De Los Santos attended AI4All, a student program created by a national nonprofit and hosted by Princeton University.
The program is aimed at underserved students with a mission to develop the next generation of AI experts who will focus on responsible AI research and development. “This is when I started finding my purpose,” says De Los Santos, who remains active in the group.
At AI4ALL, she learned about bias in technology and how the highly anticipated growth of AI would disproportionately harm already vulnerable groups. She came to understand that through research, she could help empower and uplift her communities.
“This was a turning point for me,” De Los Santos says. “I was already interested in technology and engineering, but this helped me understand that ethics is a really large issue in technology and this space needed more people.”
“I decided to attend a college that would allow me to do a lot of research and the freedom to do research within the space of AI and fairness,” she adds.
She selected Northeastern because it met her research criteria, and soon found the university offered much more. She says her experiences have been bolstered by supportive faculty and staff, co-op experience, and community engagement opportunities.
“I have been able to interact with so many faculty,” she says. “When I had moments of doubt or was not sure what my next step should be, it was so important to talk to faculty and hear about their career paths.”
De Los Santos completed a co-op at Philips, a health technology company, where she developed and debugged application components for a team creating a patient monitoring system. She also created encryption and decryption code for patient data.
“The co-op gave me the opportunity to meet people in the field who I hope to collaborate with in the future,” she says. “Co-op is really unique because it is nothing like being in class—it prepares you for the workforce. I am also grateful I was able to explore research for my later co-ops because it gave me an idea of what it is like working in a lab full-time.”
She found that student clubs, including the Black Engineering Student Society and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, for which she served as president for a year, fostered a sense of connection that gave her confidence.
“The clubs helped me find my place at Northeastern because they connected me with students who were pursuing similar majors and had a similar workload,” she says. “We also came from similar cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, so we related to each other’s unique challenges and struggles.”
During her first year, De Los Santos took a class in AI algorithms and societal impact taught by Tina Eliassi-Rad, the Joseph E. Auon Professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Inspired, she asked the professor to be her advisor for a directed study program. Under Eliassi-Rad’s guidance, she evaluated a sentiment analysis tool used to monitor social media platforms for threats and validated how they disproportionately impact marginalized communities.
Her research sparked an interest in privacy issues, and she pursued an NSF-funded student researcher opportunity at Carnegie Mellon called the Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Software Engineering (REUSE) program. De Los Santos focused on Tik-Tok and her research, which included interviewing users of the social media platform, resulted in a first-author paper, “The TikTok Tradeoff: Compelling Algorithmic Content at the Expense of Personal Privacy,” which was presented at the International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. Through her research, she discovered users either did not know or did not understand Tik-Tok’s privacy guidelines. “A lot of people shared how uncomfortable they were about how much the algorithm knew about them,” De Los Santos says.
Following her time at Carnegie Mellon, she returned to Northeastern and, as an AJC Merit Research Scholar, joined the Civic A.I. Lab, which is directed by Khoury Assistant Professor Saiph Savage. In addition to publishing several papers on human-centered AI systems, De Los Santos designed an application to help workers access information in their language about employment, fiscal management, and self-care.
“I think it’s important that we educate people about privacy,” De Los Santos says. “The goal is to design tools that help people of all ages have more agency over their personal information, understand how companies may be using their data, and empower them to push back to protect themselves.”