I'm the co-founder of a tech nonprofit, SimPPL, where we build AI systems to combat public deception influencing elections, health, and policy in 40+ countries. I cofounded Sakhi to provide reliable health information resulting in improvements in maternal care in rural India and Bangladesh incubated at MIT and UNICEF. I used to be a postdoc at Boston University and MIT building the Platform Governance Lab. I got my Ph.D. at NYU Data Science and CSMAP measuring the effects of cross-platform interventions. I worked on civic integrity at Twitter, recommender systems at Adobe, and product data science at Slack. I'm grateful to Google, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the Brown Institute at Columbia for funding my work, among others.
In the past I worked on production ML systems for particle physics, prototyping and productionizing a graph-based trending hashtag recommendation for videos, and graph-based deep learning in physics! I've also worked on ML in cybersecurity, chatbots, and open-source client APIs for IoT ML pipelines. I'm an engineer at heart and a researcher by profession so I enjoy building scalable systems to tackle hard problems!
I've led and advised the NYU AI School since 2020, conceptualized and built a Google AI-backed ML course for undergrads. I (amateur-ishly) hosted an advanced statistics reading group following Cosma Shalizi's wonderful textbook on the weekends and continue to mentor students doing impactful research. I was involved as a technical mentor for the Grand Challenge at CERN and the Stanford Scholar Initiative but most notably I co-founded and continue to lead a fast-growing FOSS-development + mentorship program for undergrads called Unicode which continues to help its undergrad mentees land offers from FAANG companies and Ivy League universities!
I managed to land a couple of nice internships (although it's super-sad that I couldn't do them all) and wrote a guide for students at the undergraduate and graduate level. I'm also working on a book about engineering education in India at the undergraduate level, hopefully coming out in 2026 2027!
- 📫 How to reach me: LinkedIn (add a note!) or Email (firstname [at] simppl [dot] org)