Swapneel Mehta is the Mumbai-born and raised Founder of SimPPL- a non-profit providing open access research toward rebuilding trust online. Among many titles, Swapneel holds a doctorate in philosophy from the NYU Center for Data Science and is also an affiliate of All Tech is Human. In this interview, he shares how his deep roots and experiences in India inspired the work he does today as a resource, leader, and community builder.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born and raised in Mumbai- I lived on the same block for a good 20 years of my life. I did end up in the US for a year or two when I was a kid. There was a lot of back and forth because my dad used to live abroad or at least work for extended periods of time in the US while my mom and the rest of the family were in India. I was back and forth so I have no recollection of the US other than memories that I regained by looking at photos of that time. It’s fun to review those photos once I grew up and can recall the memories. Growing up though, I have mostly memories of India.
How would you say your culture or community impacted you the most?
We lived in a very family-oriented environment. There was no concept of privacy, I shared everything with everyone. This led me to grow up in a way where I didn’t look for ownership of personal things. There’s some downside to it, but I think by and large, I learned to share and be generous early on. I lived around my grandparents in a building that 12 families lived in. I was the youngest kid in the building but I didn’t get a single scratch no matter what kind of games we played- everyone took care of me and raised me. That’s the culture I grew up in.
How do you keep your culture alive today?
I work with a lot of friends who I made over the years. My eighth-grade enemy is my co-founder at my startup and my friend from my master’s is my co-founder at the non-profit. My undergrad friends are board advisors and also some grad school friends are engineers that I work with. The people I grew up with are the people that we consult with on the problems we work on. The problems that I chose to work on were grounded in the fact that I wanted to keep my culture alive and work on problems that matter to my people.
Did you know from a young age that you wanted to work in the field you’re in now?
No, I would say I had very little of an idea that I would end up here. I did have clarity that I wanted to change significant parts of how my world worked and over the years, that vehicle of change became more and more clear as education. I think since 10th or 12th grade, I had this idea that I would be working toward changing things about certain fields which started out as being tech and then education. It has been about driving large-scale change and solving problems that I dealt with during my life, growing up in India, and going to an educational institution that was not the most funded. This came with its own set of resource constraints and environmental constraints around growth. I navigated all of these issues and wanted to open up a path for people to navigate the same problems. We have this concept called ‘jugaad’ which in English most closely means innovation or thinking outside of the box. I have learned that I can be really good at jugaad and make things work with limited resources. I can inspire people to work on challenging problems and make the most of tough situations. I generally grew up to be very resilient because I saw a lot of the challenges upfront and dealt with them. Now that I dealt with those challenges, there’s nothing more life can throw my way that I can’t deal with.
Who would you say is the person that most inspired who you are today?
I think a combination of my mom and my dad. My mom in terms of being a strong-armed person who will teach you to fight adversity. My dad is more of a diplomatic person who will teach you that you need to find a way to make things work for everybody. I was able to take the best elements of both of those approaches and try to distill them into something that works for me.
Can you talk about the lessons of your career journey so far?
I lacked the clarity that a lot of people have early on in their careers, so I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I went into engineering primarily because I saw that computer science seemed like the only route that allowed you to grow a lot. At least I had initially thought that was the case. I don’t think that is the case anymore, but I still feel like CS was the right decision for me.
I knew that I wanted to go abroad and explore problems that I could not deal with back home because of the resource constraints that were present in the environment I was in. I knew that I wanted more global exposure also because I was a good people person and you can tap into that skill when you’re in more people-facing roles and by being back home in India. I was mainly an engineer going to school, doing school events and extracurriculars. I wasn’t in as much of a people-facing role as a tech-oriented role, so that motivated my exploration of opportunities outside of the country. I worked in Switzerland for a year and a half, met a lot of people, saw a lot of interesting new problems, worked in tech, and then started my PhD. I worked at a start-up that got acquired and wrapped up the PhD in four years, one year ahead of plan. I am now focused on trying to land an academic job.
I keep one eye on the fact that I want to change the education system back home in India. We’ve been able to make significant progress there, getting a couple of grants from Google and Mozilla, teaching students how to build responsible computing tools, and deploying them in the field. The most important part of the work that I’m doing is not meant to be for research, although it has a strong research component. All of the work that we’re doing is for organizations that deal with society’s problems and this could be anything from healthcare to literacy, to AI, to information science, journalism, etc. We identify problems that we see in the world and then attempt to solve them as opposed to doing the converse, which a lot of researchers focus on- inventing the problems themselves and then convincing the world that this is important. I find that the level of your success depends on finding problems that people care about. It’s harder to do that sitting in a room versus going out and talking to people about their real problems. That journey eventually led me back to India where I found there are a lot of problems at home that I can make a tangible difference for. I started growing a research collective then a nonprofit and now a startup that’s focused on solving problems with healthcare and education in India.
Can you talk about your mission with SimPPL?
The mission is to rebuild trust on the internet. The challenge we’ve seen in the last couple of years is how disinformation has contributed to an erosion of trust in institutions, in media, and in democracy at large. We are working on academic solutions that try to tackle this incentive structure of why people promote misleading information. At the same time, we’re working on network science to understand how it proliferates on different online platforms. We’re working on mitigation measures to deploy consumer-facing and AI auditing tools that allow everyday users to try and evaluate the information they see online. So some parts academic, some parts media literacy, and then evaluation metrics.
What is your vision for the future of digital governance and digital democracy?
For me, governance is a very loaded term. Different people mean different things when they say governance. I think everyone agrees that governance generally deals with systemic change and that introduces certain ways of driving systemic change. For my part on the academic side, governance deals with markets, incentive structure, and better framing of existing inventions, as well as the discovery of new interventions that arise from this better thing. Organizing what has happened so far in the field is really important to try and evaluate what hasn’t been tried and what we should be trying instead. That’s part of the work that I’m doing on the governance of digital platforms and interventions.
On the digital democracy side, I’m going to say that a lot of states are now launching technologies without a clear understanding of the impact on the public. That is a problem that we’ve seen many times before. The entire purpose of environmental impact assessments before deploying large infrastructure projects is to identify at least potentially what impact is going to emerge on the environment and how it’s going to respond to this massive intervention in terms of infrastructure. In the same way, I think there needs to be a better evaluation of AI impact assessments. I think there are some people working on early implementations of this, but there hasn’t been as much progress on this front as you would say there has been for vulnerabilities proposing risks from AI or even impact assessments of what happens after AI technologies are deployed to communities, for example. So if you deploy these tools, how does it respond? What behaviors does it induce, incentivize, or shift? We just don’t have a great understanding of it. Before we have all these answers, there’s a big risk going all in on this bet.
