Mehtaverse

Bio

I am a postdoctoral associate at Boston University and MIT conducting behavioral economics research to improve the governance of digital platforms. I founded and co-lead a nonprofit, SimPPL, rebuilding trust on the social internet in 6 countries through responsible computing tools deployed with over 20 newsrooms, nonprofits, civil society orgs., and the UN. We spun out an award-winning, MIT and UNICEF-incubated tech venture delivering maternal health literacy information in India called Sakhi that is deployed with a few hundred families, and aims to reach 5,000 families by mid-2025.

I received my Ph.D. from NYU Data Science, estimating the causal effects of interventions to limit online misinformation. I have been an Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leader, Google Research Innovator, CTS Belfer Fellow, and won several grants from Google, Mozilla, and Wikimedia to support my work. In industry, I worked at Twitter, Adobe, Slack, with Meta at Oxford, (now acquired) startups, and CERN on AI products, algorithms, and applications.

Advising: I serve as a Community Advisory Board member at the Integrity Institute (read the 2023 Annual Impact), Responsible Tech Affiliate at All Tech is Human, and Board of Studies member at D.J. Sanghvi College of Engineering. I’ve mentored about 130 undergraduates and 4 high-school students. 3 of my mentees are now pursuing their Ph.Ds in Computer Science while several are graduate students, and others work at FAANG companies and startups.

Research: Fostering Digital Trust

I conduct research and develop systems that foster digital trust and credibility, identifying the social, technological, and economic drivers of trust in online information. Over the last two decades, we have witnessed a historic, yet consistent, degradation of trust in media and democratic institutions, exacerbated by GenAI. How do we begin to reverse the consequences of the erosion of digital trust? I contend that we need to study user behavior to understand the longitudinal impact of online harms, design and evaluate interventions to protect users, and reorient platform incentives to penalize the production of misleading information.

At the Platform Governance Lab that I helped set up circa Sept. 2023, We design interventions to limit fake news without relying on censorship or central authority. To achieve this, over the past year, we developed our own two-sided online marketplace (think, mini-Amazon) to run live experiments reflecting real-world marketplaces atop MIT’s Empirica framework, investigating how to limit fake ads, limit misleading social media posts, and incentivize the production of accurate information including sales by agentic AI assistants (see my research on Digital Platforms for details).

At SimPPL, we want to rebuild trust on the social internet. There are 10+ ongoing projects and 15+ published research papers available here into media, AI, platforms, and misinformation. I am also continuing my causal inference research with NYU CSMAP.

Technology Policy and Global Development

I am engaged in global development work in 6 countries via my nonprofit as well as personal research collaborations. Much of this demands an understanding of local policy as well as experience with technology policy research.

• Speaking and advocacy at programs like the Atlantic Dialogues representing the youth voice to Presidents, Ministers, and leaders at the UN, World Bank, and IMF in the audience.
• Consultations with UK and European agencies on digital safety regulation and publish technical guidance on elections integrity and platform transparency (via a think tank, the Integrity Institute)
• Developing digital healthcare infrastructure that we will work with state partners to deploy.
• Publishing research on historical lessons for social media regulation
• Expanding our fellowships program statewide, across numerous educational institutions through support from Mozilla and Google in India! (read the outcomes and write to me if you are interested in such a program for your students)

Teaching

Since 2017, I have taught students roughly each weekend, initially as part of founding DJ Unicode as an open-source programming bootcamp, expanding it via Unicode Research for collaborative research and recently the NYU AI School for HMGs and non-CS majors to learn applied AI/ML, funded by Deepmind and Genentech, now an in-house program at NYU. I ran a 13-week ML course, UMLSC for undergrads from underserved Indian institutions in 2020 that culminated in the founding of SimPPL, awarded by Google exploreCSR and Mozilla RCC India, winning competitive grants to advance our fellowships program, training undergrads as prolific research engineers.

My team has published 15+ papers at ICML, IC2S2, ICWSM, NeurIPS, AAAI, Stanford Trust and Safety, Dg.O, and other workshops/conferences. I’ve also been a mentor with Lumiere Education, Make a Difference, UAlberta Career Mentoring Program, and actively participate in NYU Alumni Talks to give back to my community.

2024

• Invited talk to Google’s Monetized Product Policy Team! (details TBD)
• Talk accepted at Yale AI, ML, Business Analytics Conference discussing “Market Interventions for Safer Agentic AI”.
• Talk accepted at MarkTech Conference at Columbia Business School, “Limiting Misleading Ads in Online Marketplaces without Censorship or Central Authority” (BU and MIT)
• Finalist, Schmidt Futures Intl. Strategy Forum.
• Selected for Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program in Morocco!
  • Elected as a representative of the cohort of 41 Emerging Leaders to present our views on global challenges to dignitaries including Presidents, PMs, and leadership at UN, World Bank, and IMF!
• Short Oral at WISE 2024 on “Improving Economic Welfare in Reputation-based Marketplaces with Truth Warrants”.
• Nominated for BU’s Inaugural Best Postdoc Award.
• Selected as finalist for Lightning Talk Competition, for BU Postdocs.
• 1 Lightning Talk and 2 Poster sessions accepted at Stanford T&S Research Conference.
  • Talk, “Limiting Misleading Ads in Online Marketplaces without Censorship or Central Authority” (BU and MIT)
  • Poster, “Bridging Nodes and Narrative Flows: A Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Telegram’s Disinformation Ecosystem” (SimPPL Team)
  • Poster, “The Double-Edged Sword of User Agency: Empowerment and Risk in Decentralized Social Media Platforms” (SimPPL Team)
• Oral Talk at IC2S2 on “Improving Governance in Online Marketplaces using Truth Warrant”
• Invited Panel on AI Auditing by Dr. Rumman Chowdhury from Humane Intelligence and ATIH.
• Paper on the “History of Transparency Regulations” accepted at Dg.O in Taiwan!
• Invited talk at the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day event on Disinformation Tactics in the Super-election Year, in Chile. Thanks to our wonderful moderator, Carsten von Nahmen, MD at Deutsche Welle.
• Selected for MIT’s flagship Delta V Accelerator Program for Sakhi
• Won 2nd place at MIT’s PKG IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge!
• Sakhi featured on Rest of World, thanks to the wonderful team!
• Invited Panelist at TrustCon 2024 on GenAI and Election Threats
• Featured on DW Akademie’s Tackling Disinformation Toolkit
• Invited Panelist at Finnish Embassy in NYC on “Strengthening the Information Ecosystem”

2023

• Won the prestigious Belfer Fellowship (2 fellows annually) to pursue independent research into networked hate and harassment.
• Selected as a Responsible Tech Affiliate with All Tech is Human.
• Co-authored the Integrity Institute’s:
  • Blog post on GenAI.
  • Transparency Best Practices Deck.
  • Response to Oversight Board on the matter of Meta’s keyword-based enforcement.
• Got a mention on the Google Cloud blog!
• Won the AI2Amplify Fellowship as well as their Hackathon!
• Accepted into the Integrity Institute.
• Received a Google Research Innovator Award.
• Received WikiCred (Wikimedia) funding for expanding Parrot Report with a featured blog post up here
• Hosting multiple talks, workshops for Deutsche Welle Akademie staff and partners (read more)

2022

• Our workshop on AI for Agent-based Models accepted at ICLR 2023!
• Training undergrads from multilingual countries like India to conduct social network analysis via Unicode Research Seminars
• Co-organizing the NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Broadening Research Collaborations in ML.
• Accepted a position on the Board of Studies at my alma mater, D.J. Sanghvi College of Engineering!
• Invited to present my research on ‘Tools to Limit Disinformation on Social Networks’ at:
  • MIT Media Lab
  • Misinfo. Village @ DEFCON 2022
  • Truth and Trust Online
  • Graphika
• Presented this work on studying the causal effects of Twitter’s interventions on Donald Trump’s tweets at the first Stanford Trust and Safety Research Conference.
• This paper with Oxford and CSMAP studying the effects of influence operations on content ranking and recommendations accepted for an Oral (top 3/26 papers) at the AI for Agent-based Models Workshop at ICML 2022.
• Interning at Twitter’s Civic Integrity team working on the early detection of misinformation in tweets.

2021

• SimPPL selected for NYC Media Lab’s AI and Local News Challenge!
• Early work on SimPPL: Simulating Social Network Interventions with Probabilistic Programs was invited for a presentation to:
  • Twitter’s Cortex Org.
  • Facebook’s Probability Org.
• I received an offer to be a Data Scientist Intern with Microsoft’s Azure ML Team
• Compartmental Models for COVID-19 and Control via Policy Interventions accepted at PROBPROG 2021, MIT.
• “Open Domain Trending Hashtag Recommendation for Videos” with Adobe Research was accepted at the International Symposium for Multimedia, 2021.

2019 - 2020

• I’m a Data Science Research Intern at Adobe Research from May - Dec 2020 at the BEL Lab.
• I’m grateful to have received the IRIS-HEP Fellowship, 2019
• I launched Unicode Research
• For published articles on technology look up my contributions to the Open Source for You (OSFY) Magazine