Mehtaverse

Bio

I am a postdoctoral associate at Boston University and MIT conducting behavioral economics research to improve platform governance while protecting free speech. 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, civil society orgs., and the UN. It spun out an award-winning, MIT-incubated tech venture delivering maternal health literacy information in rural India called Sakhi that is deployed live with 30 families in an early pilot.

I received my Ph.D. from NYU Data Science, estimating the causal effects of interventions to limit misinformation. I have been a 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, 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.

Research

My research investigates the causes, impact, and mitigation of consumer harms on digital platforms with an emphasis on better governance to limit the effects of negative externalities. At the Platform Governance Lab that I helped build since Sept. 2023, We design interventions to limit fake news without relying on censorship or central authority. To achieve this, we developed our own two-sided interactive marketplace (think, Amazon) to run live experiments atop Empirica investigating how to limit fake ads, misleading social media posts, and incentivize the production of accurate information including by agentic AI assistants.

At SimPPL, we conduct responsible AI research into the monitoring, measurement, and mitigation of misleading information on the social internet. There are 10+ ongoing projects and 5-ish research papers I’m working on teams with, available here. I am also continuing my collaboration on causal inference research from my Ph.D. with NYU CSMAP and Oxford Torr Vision Group.

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 8+ 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, 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, see you in Morocco!
• Short Oral at WISE 2024 on “Improving Economic Welfare in Reputation-based Marketplaces with Truth Warrants”. See you in Thailand, in December!
• 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