Mehtaverse

by Swapneel

swapneel_headshot.jpg

Swapneel Mehta

Postdoc at BU and MIT

Founder at SimPPL

Cambridge, MA

Bio

I am a postdoctoral associate at Boston University and MIT researching platform governance through virtual experiments involving 'information-sharing marketplaces'. I founded SimPPL, a research collective in the global south, developing open-access trust and safety tools for international orgs. including nonprofits and newsrooms. I received my Ph.D. at NYU Data Science working at CSMAP, and collaborating with folks at Oxford TVG. My research deals with limiting disinformation on social networks using tools from machine learning and causal inference:

  1. Estimating the Causal Effects of Policy Interventions
  2. Auditing the Impact of Content Recommendation Algorithms
  3. Building Civic Integrity Tools for Practitioners and Policymakers

I’ve interned with Twitter Civic Integrity, Adobe Research, and worked on machine learning for particle physics at CERN.

I founded SimPPL (read: ‘sim people’), a collective that builds better civic integrity tools such as Parrot Report. We’ve worked with The Sunday Times, Ippen Media, Deutsche Welle, the Yale Daily News, the Vermont Digger, and others on:

  1. Supporting newsrooms to better understand their audiences on social networks.
  2. Study the spread of unreliable news and identify influence operations online.

SimPPL has received support from the Wikimedia Foundation, Google, AWS, the NYC Media Lab, AI2Amplify (German Federal funding), and the NYU Tech Venture Workshop. It is materially supported by the One Fact Foundation and the AI4ABM Foundation at Oxford.

I mentor students and conduct collaborative research with Unicode Research. This team was born out of the parent org. I co-founded in 2017 to teach open-source development to undergrads, called DJ Unicode.

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