Vashistha employs community-engaged approaches to design technologies that improve socioeconomic outcomes for underserved populations, for example helping to improve rural healthcare and education in India. He also serves as faculty director of the Hack4Impact club and created INFO 4505: Computing and Global Development, working with students to design inclusive technologies with a positive social impact.

Fellows come from all over the university, bringing their particular passions and living out the public purpose of their discipline through teaching and researching in, with and for community.
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In this project, I examine how AI systems — especially large language models — are being rapidly adopted in high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare and agriculture across the Global South, where their outputs can directly affect health, learning and livelihoods. While these technologies promise to boost productivity, expand access to knowledge and enable new forms of creativity, they also reproduce gender, caste and racial biases, lack cultural awareness, and privilege Western epistemologies. To address these risks, this project partners with grassroots organizations in India to study how AI tools are designed, adapted and deployed in local contexts, and to co-create sociotechnical frameworks that make these systems culturally aligned, contextually relevant and safe.