cv

General Information

Full Name Swapneel Mehta
Summary Postdoctoral Associate and Founder.
Languages English, Hindi, Gujarati, Spanish (basic), French (basic)

Education

  • 2023
    Ph.D., Data Science
    Center for Data Science, New York University
    • Google Research Innovator; AI2Amplify Fellow
    • Thesis - Towards Informed Interventions to Limit the Effects of Misleading Information on Social Networks
    • Advisors - Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler at Center for Social Media and Politics
    • Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Social Networks, Probabilistic Programs
  • 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
    • Belfer Fellowship, Center for Tech and Society and Responsible Tech Affiliate, All Tech is Human
    • Researching platform governance, free speech, and democracy jointly at BU (Questrom Business School) and MIT (Sloan, Initiative for Digital Economy).
  • 2021 - Present
    Founder
    SimPPL, New York
    • Audit online disinformation, influence operations, and state-backed cyber warfare via parrot.report
    • Digital strategy and audience analysis for The Sunday Times (UK), Deutsche Welle, Yale Daily News; GCHQ, USAF.
    • Awarded USD 35,000 in grants from AWS, Google, the Wikimedia Fdn., the NYC Media Lab, and JournalismAI.
  • 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 - Present
    Graduate Researcher
    Center for Social Media and Politics, NYU
    • Estimating the causal effects of Reddit’s platform downtime on the spread of low quality news online (ongoing).
    • Estimating the causal impact of Twitter’s interventions on Donald Trump’s tweets presented at Stanford T&S Conf.
    • Modeling policy interventions for epidemiology models accepted at PROBPROG 2021, MIT.

Internships

  • 2023
    Ph.D. Product Data Science Intern
    Slack (Salesforce) Inc., New York
    • Working on Slack's Central DS Team to understand how 'social' learning affects product feature adoption among enterprise Slack users.
    • Developing strategies for product growth using tools from machine learning and causal inference.
  • 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 30% to be deployed into production to score millions of tweets a week.
  • 2021 -
    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.
  • 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).

Honors and Awards

  • 2023
  • 2022
    • News Product Alliance Mentorship Program
    • Digital Forensics Lab - Digital Sherlocks Program
    • Algovera AI Research, Community Grant Rounds 5, 7, 8 (USD 3000)
    • Amazon Web Services Research Grant (USD 5000)
    • Google Cloud Research Award (USD 1000)
    • NYU Tech Ventures Workshop (USD 1000)
    • NYC Media Lab AI + Local News Challenge (USD 7500)
  • 2021
    • Google AI Research India (INR 85,000)
    • IRIS - HEP Fellowship
    • UK Research and Innovation Grant, Profs. Philip Torr and Günes Baydin (GBP 23,200)
  • 2018-20
    • 2nd place, Oxford MLHEP Challenge
    • Economic Times Campus Stars, India's Top 33 Engineers