Aatman Vaidya

I am a Master’s student in Computational Linguistics at the University of Tübingen. Previously, I worked as a Research Engineer at Tattle, where I built citizen-centric tools and datasets to understand and respond to online harms.

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!):

• Platform-Mediated Harms. I study how harmful content spreads across online platforms. My earlier work analyzed the propagation of toxic content on Twitter, Koo, and Gab. I have also done a mixed-methods cross-platform study of the illicit betting app ecosystem in India tracing how deceptive social media promotion; misleading ads, fake celebrity endorsements, deepfakes connects to documented financial harm experienced by users.

• Human-AI Interaction. I am interested in understanding how people actually use AI systems? how they seek information through AI versus Web. My current work collects and analyzes real-world interaction data from the Global South to study how these exchanges unfold in practice across diverse demographic contexts and what that means for designing human-AI systems that are safer and more socio-culturally aligned. (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, now part of the MLCommons AIluminate suite. These insights directly shaped tools like Uli, a browser plugin that redacts abusive content in low-resource languages, and Feluda, an engine for multilingual and multimodal content analysis.

You can find more information about me from my CV.