I pronounce my name like Maroon (with an N) Ramen–quite an unappetizing sight.1 Having said that, please feel free to email me pictures of oddly colored noodles that you have made or found:
narunram [at] cs [dot] ubc [dot] ca
I am currently a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I am supervised by Kevin Leyton-Brown. My research focuses on understanding digital behavior–which, for me, means understanding how humans interact within digital environments and how large language models behave and interact. I am very available via email so please do reach out if you would like to collaborate or chat, I would love to get coffee.2
Previously, I completed my Master's in Computer Science at UBC under the supervision of Kevin Leyton-Brown. My thesis was on formalizing the motivations behind purchase intentions for digital goods, in particular, why people pay to not play. During my Master's (Winter 2023), I TA'd for Kevin's course Models of Strategic Behavior. The course page contains videos giving a pretty good intro into game theory, mechanism design, and behavioral economics, and a list of some fun3 problem sets. Before UBC, I completed a Bachelor's in Computer Science and Mathematics at Carleton College,4 which culminated in an undergraduate thesis on predicting Wikipedia article quality. I have also worked as a software engineer; you can find more details about my work experiences in my resume. Google Scholar GitHub LinkedIn CV ResumeRecent-ish News
- Our Test Exploiters paper was accepted to the Workshop on Assessing and Improving Reliability of Foundation Models in the Real World at AAAI (2026)!
- STEER-ME was accepted to NeurIPS (2025)! See a PDF of the poster here.
- Kevin gave a talk covering our work, to date, on assessing the economic rationality in large language models. The slides are available here.
- Our workshop paper was accepted to the Information Economics x LLMs Workshop at EC (2025). A PDF of the paper is available here.