Swapneel Mehta

AI trust, safety, and digital platforms research; leading SimPPL, a nonprofit research lab with $2.5M in grants from Google, Mozilla, Omidyar Network, Ford Foundation, and Deutsche Welle. Co-PI on a grant with the Harvard/INSEAD AI Venture Lab.

English, Hindi, Gujarati, Spanish (basic), French (basic)

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

D.J. Sanghvi College of Engg., University of Mumbai

• Applied Math, Graph Theory, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms

Harvard/INSEAD AI Venture Lab, with Prof. Hyunjin Kim

• Co-PI on a grant with the lab, funded by Omidyar Network and the Ford Foundation, investigating how investors value Responsible AI practices at startups.

SimPPL, New York

• Founded an AI trust and safety research lab selected into the Fast Forward tech nonprofit accelerator, co-leading 5 full-time engineers and 60+ fellows.
• Secured $2.5 million in grants/revenue from Google, Mozilla, Omidyar Network, Ford Foundation, Deutsche Welle, the NYC Media Lab, and JournalismAI.
• Launched Arbiter, a UNDP-supported platform scaling cross-platform social discourse analysis to 50M+ posts/week, helping journalists surface what’s shaping public conversations.
• 20+ partnerships in 7 countries, with 10+ papers at ICWSM, AAAI, NeurIPS and ICML.

Boston University and MIT

• Research on digital platforms and AI safety in multi-turn environments; developed human-AI marketplaces to test economic interventions limiting advertising deception.
• Running behavioral experiments with 4,000+ participants in multiagent marketplaces. Helped found and grow the Platform Governance Lab to 25+ members.
• Papers at Nature Comms. (R&R), ICIS; Invited Talks at ACR, SCP, WISE, IC2S2, Stanford TSRC, Columbia MarkTech, Yale AI/ML Conference, and industry (Bluesky, Google).

Sakhi, Mumbai, India, and Cambridge, MA

• MIT-incubated AI platform deploying RCTs to improve reproductive health literacy, piloted with 350 families in India and Bangladesh.
• Partnerships with Indian Council of Medical Research (Maternal and Child Health); working with Cohere Labs on designing robust multilingual evaluations for medical LLMs.
• Awards from AWS, MIT IDEAS, Delta-V, UNDP; invited to submit $2 million Gates Foundation proposal; featured on Rest of World.

Center for Social Media and Politics, NYU

• Estimating the causal effect of Reddit outages on low-quality news sharing; Identifying the causal effects of Twitter’s warning labels on Trump’s tweets.
• COVID infection modeling with probabilistic programs (MIT PROBPROG).
• Lead organizer of NYU AI School (2020-2024, funded by Deepmind and Genentech); founded AI, Misinformation & Policy Seminar (2023-2024).

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.

Slack Inc. (Salesforce), New York

• Identified social learning drivers of collaborative feature adoption for Slack.

Twitter (X), Civic Integrity, New York

• Improved precision of civic/health misinformation classifier by 20%; scaled to 1M+ tweets/week (BigQuery ML, NLP, recommender systems).

University of Oxford, Torr Vision Group

• Generative modeling of adversarial agent behaviors on Reddit recommendations; presented at ICML (AI4ABM) and DEFCON Misinfo. Village (2022).

Adobe Research, New York

• Open-domain trending hashtag recommendation for videos; multimodal GNNs, weak supervision, LLMs.
• First-author paper at IEEE ISM 2021; U.S. Patent 12050647.

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.

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.

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.

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 as an ITS Rio Fellow
• Selected as an ISPI Next Business Leader
• Finalist for OSV Fellowship
• SimPPL selected into the Fast Forward tech nonprofit accelerator

• Selected as Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leader
• Won the Google exploreCSR Award x 2 (USD 32,000 + 75,000); and the inaugural Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge, India (USD 25,000)
• Selected as Future Today Institute - People to Watch in AI and Local News

• Google Research Innovator Award
• WikiCred Grant, Wikimedia Foundation (USD 10,000)
• 2nd place “Spam and Misinformation”, WSDM Smart City Challenge (USD 1000)
• Grant Funding, JournalismAI Team Parrot (USD 2000)

• 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)

• Google AI Research India (INR 85,000)
• IRIS - HEP Fellowship
• UK Research and Innovation Grant, Profs. Philip Torr and Günes Baydin (GBP 23,200)

• 2nd place, Oxford MLHEP Challenge
• Economic Times Campus Stars, India's Top 33 Engineers