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General Information (PDF)

Full Name Swapneel Mehta
Summary 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 at Harvard/INSEAD AI Venture Lab.
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

  • 2026 - Present
    Co-PI
    Harvard/INSEAD AI Venture Lab, with Prof. Hyunjin Kim
    • Co-PI on a grant funded by Omidyar Network and Ford Foundation, investigating how investors value Responsible AI practices at startups.
  • 2021 - Present
    Co-Founder and President
    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 16+ workshop publications at ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, ICWSM, IC2S2, dg.o, TPRC, Stanford TSRC.
  • 2023 - 2025
    Postdoctoral Associate
    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).
  • 2023 - 2025
    Co-Founder and Chief Scientist
    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.
  • 2021 - 2024
    Graduate Researcher
    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).
  • 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.

Internships

  • 2023
    Product Data Science Intern
    Slack Inc. (Salesforce), New York
    • Identified social learning drivers of collaborative feature adoption for Slack.
  • 2022
    Ph.D. Machine Learning Engineer Intern
    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).
  • 2021 - 2022
    Visiting Researcher
    University of Oxford, Torr Vision Group
    • Generative modeling of adversarial agent behaviors on Reddit recommendations; presented at ICML (AI4ABM) and DEFCON Misinfo. Village (2022).
  • 2020
    Data Science Research Intern
    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.
  • 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)