Aatman Vaidya

I am a SDE/ Researcher at Tattle, where I contribute to building citizen centric open-source tools and datasets to understand and respond to online harms and abuse in India.

I work at the intersection of language, technology and society. My research interests broadly lie in computational social science and human centered AI, with a focus in measuring and mitigating harms like hate speech and misinformation particularly in low-resource contexts and making digital spaces safer and more inclusive.

Here are some research directions I work on:

• Understanding spread of information on online platforms and designing strategies to mitigate it. I particularly study how harmful content propagates on social networks like Twitter, Koo and Gab. I also examine the cross-platform spread of misinformation, like how health-related misinformation and financial scams spread across platforms (ongoing work).
• Community-led participatory approach for online safety. I strive to build safer and culturally well rounded AI systems that are centered on lived experiences of people at the end of online violence.. Through expert-led participatory approaches, I aim to understand the context-specific ways that harm manifests in different regions and communities. This approach has informed our development of AI safety benchmark dataset on sex and hate-related crimes in Hindi and dataset for online gender-based violence in India.
• Building user centric tools to combat online abuse. At Tattle, I help build tools like Uli, a browser plugin that redacts slurs and abusive content from your online feed; Feluda, an engine for analysing multi-lingual and multi-modal content; Deepfakes Analysis Unit, a collaborative space for analyzing deepfakes and AI generated content and Viral Spiral, a multiplayer card game about sharing news on the internet.

You can find more information about me from my CV.