Aatman Vaidya

I am a Master’s student in Computational Linguistics at the University of Tübingen. I am currently working as a Research Assistant with Juhi Kulshrestha in the Computational Social Science group at Aalto University.

I am also advised by Kiran Garimella from Rutgers University, with whom I work on platform-mediated harms and human-AI interaction in the Global South.

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 online harms in low-resource contexts and making digital spaces safer and more inclusive.

Here are some research directions I work on (and I am exicted about!):

• Online Platform-Mediated Harms. I study how harmful and deceptive content spreads across online platforms and translates into real-world harm. My recent work quantified the illicit betting app ecosystem in India, tracing how deceptive promotion connects to documented financial harm.

• Human-AI Interaction. I am interested in understanding how people actually use AI systems? how people seek information through generative AI versus the web, studied using real-world conversation data from Global South. (ongoing work)

• Participatory Design & Safety Tools. I believe safety interventions must be grounded in the lived experiences of those most affected by online harm. At Tattle, I worked with gender rights organizations in India using participatory methods to build a dataset on online gender-based violence and co-developed an AI safety benchmark for Hindi.

Before starting my Master’s, I worked as a Research Engineer at Tattle, building citizen-centric tools and datasets to understand and respond to online harms.

You can find more information about me from my CV.