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General Information

Full Name Swapneel Mehta
Summary Postdoctoral Associate, Data Science Ph.D., Founded a nonprofit and a startup working across 6 countries w/ UNICEF, MIT, Google, Mozilla funding.
Languages English, Hindi, Gujarati, Spanish (basic), French (basic)

Education

  • 2023
    Ph.D., Data Science
    Center for Data Science, New York University
    • Google Research Innovator Award, WikiCred Grant, UKRI Grant, AWS Credit Grant
    • Thesis - Towards Informed Interventions to Limit the Effects of Online Misinformation
    • Advisors - Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler at Center for Social Media and Politics
    • Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Social Networks, Recommender Systems
  • 2018
    B. Eng., Computer Engineering
    D.J. Sanghvi College of Engg., University of Mumbai
    • Applied Math, Graph Theory, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms

Experience

  • 2023 - Present
    Postdoctoral Associate and Staff
    Boston University and MIT
    • Investigating how to mitigate false ads in digital marketplaces, launching the Platform Governance Lab which I helped grow from 9 to 28 members.
    • Nominated for Best Postdoc Award, Boston University, 2024.
    • Invited talks at IC2S2, Stanford, MIT, Yale AI/ML Conference, Columbia MarkTech Conference, WISE.
    • Mentoring Capstone projects at MIT, BU, and NYU.
  • 2021 - Present
    Co-Founder and President
    SimPPL, New York
    • Rebuilding digital trust by using responsible AI to combat online harms.
    • Scaled to 6 countries and 20+ partners with 22-member team, including UN, Deutsche Welle, and NY Public Radio.
    • Awarded USD 275,000 in grants from Google exploreCSR, Mozilla RCC India, the Wikimedia Fdn., AWS, the NYC Media Lab, and JournalismAI (via the Sunday Times and Ippen Digital).
  • 2023 - Present
    Co-Founder and Chief Scientist
    Sakhi, Mumbai, India, and Cambridge, MA
    • MIT-incubated tech venture improving women's health literacy through AI-informed, personalized behavioral interventions on WhatsApp.
    • Launched IRB-backed maternal health pilot with 140 families in Jalgaon, India and menstrual health pilot with 200+ families in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
    • Won USD 62,500 in grants from AWS, MIT IDEAS, Delta-V, UNICEF, UNDP.
    • Invited to present to the World Bank (eMBeD), consult with teams at MIT SEID and PM Lab.
  • 2021 - Present
    Graduate Researcher and Affiliate
    Center for Social Media and Politics, NYU
    • Estimating the causal effects of Reddit’s platform downtime on the spread of low quality news online (Working Paper).
    • Estimating the causal impact of Twitter’s interventions on Donald Trump’s tweets presented at Stanford T&S Conf., in preparation for PNAS.
    • Modeling policy interventions for epidemiology models accepted at PROBPROG 2021, MIT.
  • 2018 - 2019
    TSP Researcher
    CERN, Geneva
    • Built graph neural networks for particle track reconstruction using collision data from the Large Hadron Collider.
    • Built, maintained, and deployed the ‘DeepJet’ deep learning package into production across 42 global sites.
    • Google Cloud Award and the Oxford MLHEP Award for our work
  • 2021 - 2022
    Visiting Researcher
    University of Oxford, UK
    • Simulating the impact of influence operations on ranking and recommender systems on social networks.
    • First-author workshop paper presented at the AI4ABM Workshop at ICML 2022; Misinfocon at DEFCON 2022.
    • Paper on dynamic detection of bot networks and LLM-generated bot content in preparation for EMNLP.

Internships

  • 2023
    Product Data Science Intern
    Slack Inc. (Salesforce), New York
    • Worked with the Central Data Science team to improve their understanding of the adoption growth from the "social learning" component of collaborative product features for teams using Slack.
  • 2022
    Ph.D. Machine Learning Engineer Intern
    Twitter Inc., New York
    • Worked with Civic Integrity and sister teams at Twitter Health, improving the precision of their civic and health misinformation classifier (BigQuery ML) by 20% to be deployed into production to score millions of tweets a week.
  • 2020
    Data Science Intern
    Adobe Research, California
    • Trending Hashtag Recommendation for Videos; web-scraping, weakly-supervised learning, graph neural networks.
    • First-author paper accepted IEEE Intl. Symposium on Multimedia 2021; U.S. Patent App P10634-US.
  • 2016 - 2017
    Research Intern, Prof. Sameer Sahasrabudhe
    Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
    • Automated the evaluation for 3D Modeling assignments in Blender; Course Instructor, edX Prize Finalist, 2019.
    • Published a first-author short paper at IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, 2018.
  • 2016 - 2017
    Software Engineering Intern
    Smokescreen Technologies (acq. ZScaler), Mumbai
    • Combined low-latency network scans, hostname clustering, intelligent decoys, and automated deployment using custom-built modules integrated into the NASSCOM-DSCI award-winning IllusionBlack software, 3rd Gen., 2017.
  • 2016 - 2016
    Software Engineering Intern
    Falkonry Software Solutions, Mumbai
    • Developed and deployed real-time data streaming and subscription-based alerts in the three client connectors released as open-source codebases in Java, Python and Javascript.
  • 2016 - 2016
    Research Intern, Microsoft Research
    Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
    • Created a Google Analytics Dashboard to track and monitor user interactions on the “Lokacart” app.
    • Presented the project to Microsoft Research and a committee of IIT-B faculty (video available).

Selected Honors (see PDF for details)