Mehtaverse

by Swapneel

swapneel_headshot_external.png

Swapneel Mehta

Postdoc at BU and MIT

Founder at SimPPL

Cambridge, MA

Bio

I am a postdoctoral associate at Boston University and MIT conducting research to improve the governance of digital platforms in the age of AI. I founded and co-lead a nonprofit, SimPPL, rebuilding trust on the social internet in 6 countries through responsible AI tools deployed with over 20 newsrooms, nonprofits, civil society orgs., and the UN. We raised ~$350,000 in grants and revenues, and even spun out an award-winning, MIT and UNICEF-incubated tech venture delivering maternal health literacy information in India called Sakhi that is deployed with 300 families, and aims to reach 5,000 families by mid-2025, receiving partnership offers from two leading frontier AI companies.

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.

Research: Fostering Digital Trust in the age of AI

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 ads without relying on censorship or central authority. To achieve this, over the past year, we developed our own open-source, two-sided online marketplace (think, mini-Amazon) atop MIT’s Empirica framework. We are running experiments with over 4,000 online participants and counting, investigating how to limit fake ads, limit misleading social media posts, and incentivize the production of accurate information including deceptive sales by agentic AI (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.

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.

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.

2025

2024

2023

2022

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

selected publications