Mehtaverse
by Swapneel
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 aims to reach 5,000 families by 2026.
I received my Ph.D. from NYU Data Science, estimating the causal effects of interventions to improve online safety. 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.
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. How do we begin to reverse the consequences of the erosion of digital trust? I study user behavior to understand the longitudinal impact of online harms, design, and evaluate interventions to protect users.
Governing Digital Platforms
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. I run experiments with over 4,000 online participants in human-AI marketplaces investigating how to limit misleading ads, incentivize the production of honest information, and limit deceptive sales by agentic AI (read more).
Building a Responsible AI Non-profit
At SimPPL, our mission is to rebuild trust on the social internet. We develop societal AI solutions and publish research into AI, platforms, and digital harm. We are a community of 200+ engineers and researchers with 20 active members working with the world's largest newsrooms, nonprofits, the UN, and other agencies in seven countries.
Technology Policy
I am a technologist with experience doing 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
Teaching
AI Schools: 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.
AI Research: 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.
AI Product Development:I ran our AI Fellowships program and an AI Product Development program across numerous educational institutions through support from Mozilla and Google. Read the outcomes and write to me if you are interested in such a program for your students
AI Research: 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.
AI Product Development:I ran our AI Fellowships program and an AI Product Development program across numerous educational institutions through support from Mozilla and Google. Read the outcomes and write to me if you are interested in such a program for your students
Advising: I served as a Community Advisory Board member at the Integrity Institute (read the 2023 Annual Impact), Responsible Tech Affiliate at All Tech is Human, and sit on 3 Boards of Studies 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.
News
- Invited talk at AMA Marketing and Public Policy Conference.
- Presenting Sakhi at MIT Decentralized AI Summit (April 14-16).
- Finalist for the OSV Fellowship, 2025.
- Incubated with UNICEF for Arbiter, open source AI tools for social listening.
- Invited panelist on "Our Tech Future: Promise and Perils" at Prince Mahidol Awards Conference 2025.
- Sakhi collaboration initiated with Indian Council of Medical Research for multi-state pilots.
- Invited talk at Misinfocon India.
- Cofounder Smriti Bhaya finalist at Commonwealth Youth Awards for Sakhi.
- Invited talk to Google's Monetized Product Policy Team.
- Launched a Mozilla-funded Responsible AI Product Development Program to scale AI ventures.
- Selected for ITS Rio Global Policy Fellowship (Brazil).
- Selected for NEXT Milan Business Leaders Award by ISPI.
- Talk at Yale AI, ML, Business Analytics Conference on "Market Interventions for Safer Agentic AI".
- Talk at MarkTech Conference at Columbia Business School.
- Finalist, Schmidt Futures Intl. Strategy Forum.
- Selected for Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program in Morocco.
- Short Oral at WISE 2024 on economic welfare in reputation-based marketplaces.
- Nominated for BU's Inaugural Best Postdoc Award.
- Finalist for BU Postdocs Lightning Talk Competition.
- Lightning Talk and 2 Posters at Stanford T&S Research Conference.
- Oral Talk at IC2S2 on governance in online marketplaces.
- Invited Panel on AI Auditing by Dr. Rumman Chowdhury.
- Paper on the "History of Transparency Regulations" accepted at Dg.O in Taiwan.
- Invited talk at UNESCO World Press Freedom Day event in Chile.
- Selected for MIT's Delta V Accelerator Program for Sakhi.
- Won 2nd place at MIT's PKG IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge.
- Sakhi featured on Rest of World.
- Invited Panelist at TrustCon 2024 on GenAI and Election Threats.
- Featured on DW Akademie's Toolkit.
- Invited Panelist at Finnish Embassy in NYC on Strengthening the Information Ecosystem.
- Won the Belfer Fellowship for research into networked hate and harassment.
- Selected as Responsible Tech Affiliate with All Tech is Human.
- Co-authored Integrity Institute's Blog post on GenAI, Transparency Best Practices Deck, and Response to Oversight Board.
- Mentioned on the Google Cloud blog.
- Won the AI2Amplify Fellowship and Hackathon.
- Accepted into the Integrity Institute.
- Received Google Research Innovator Award.
- Received WikiCred (Wikimedia) funding for Parrot Report (featured blog post).
- Hosted talks and workshops for Deutsche Welle Akademie staff and partners (read more).
- Workshop on AI for Agent-based Models accepted at ICLR 2023.
- Training undergrads in social network analysis via Unicode Research Seminars.
- Co-organized NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Broadening Research Collaborations in ML.
- Accepted position on Board of Studies at D.J. Sanghvi College of Engineering.
- Invited to present research at MIT Media Lab, Misinfo. Village @ DEFCON 2022, Truth and Trust Online, Graphika.
- Presented work on Twitter interventions at Stanford Trust and Safety Research Conference.
- Paper with Oxford and CSMAP accepted for Oral at AI for Agent-based Models Workshop at ICML 2022.
- Interned at Twitter's Civic Integrity team.
- SimPPL selected for NYC Media Lab's AI and Local News Challenge.
- Early SimPPL work presented to Twitter's Cortex Org and Facebook's Probability Org.
- Offer to be Data Scientist Intern with Microsoft's Azure ML Team.
- COVID-19 Policy Interventions paper accepted at PROBPROG 2021, MIT.
- Trending Hashtag Recommendation for Videos with Adobe Research accepted at ISM 2021.
- Data Science Research Intern at Adobe Research (May - Dec 2020).
- Received IRIS-HEP Fellowship, 2019.
- Launched Unicode Research.
- Published articles in Open Source for You (OSFY) Magazine.