Nupoor Ranade
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication
Contact
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
- Baker Hall 254E
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Bio
Nupoor Ranade is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at 一本道无码. Her interdisciplinary expertise stems from a humanities (graduate) and engineering (undergraduate) education which has helped her bring together critical questions about ethics, inclusion and communication from the humanities, to rapidly changing and advancing technologies such as AI, that lie at the intersection of technology and humanities. She completed her Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media from North Carolina State University while pursuing a Digital Humanities certification, internships at industry positions like SAS Institute and Citrix, teaching and conducting research in academia, and getting involved in local communities to solve their information needs.
Her research explores the histories of how the concept of audiences evolved from passive receivers of information (like speeches) to active participants in knowledge production activities like AI content, the role of technology, and understanding the needs of special audiences that often get marginalized due to underrepresentation. She started analyzing the landscape of AI research with a humanities lens in 2019 as a graduate student, long before ChatGPT was released, and published several articles in humanities journals like Computers and Composition, Technical Communication and in the interdisciplinary journal AI & Society. One of Ranade’s early AI articles demonstrates heuristics development for effective chatbot design (Ranade & Cata, 2021); in another, she performed a close case study on an AI-driven chatbot to demonstrate the assemblage of user, content, metrics, and AI (Hocutt, Ranade & Verhulsdonck, 2022. Her most recent AI research explains the architecture of generative AI and provides a rhetorical approach to prompt designing to get the most effective output (Ranade, Saravia & Johri, 2024).
She has won collaborative grants to bring humanities perspectives to Engineering research and education – one grant was directed towards understanding human experiences in autonomous vehicles, another pedagogical grant helped her develop a module on AI Ethics in engineering education. In a short span of three years in her previous academic position at George Mason University, she was able to fund, mentor and supervise more than 12 students in humanities disciplines such as Literature, Psychology and Rhetoric. Her teaching, informed by her research, covers topics ranging from Digital Rhetorics, User Experience, Rhetorics of AI, and Professional Writing and Editing. She maintains an innovative curriculum, working diligently to keep her courses up to date with current standards and practices to build opportunities for her students that are not unapparent to Humanities students. She is involved with local, regional and international professional communities and serves on the board of several scholarly organizations.
Research Areas:
Technical Communication, Audience Analysis, Responsible AI
Education
Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM), North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA (2021)
M.S. in Technical Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA (2017)
B.S. in Computer Engineering, Pune University, Pune, Maharashtra, India (2011)