Updates
A reverse-chronological log of talks, fellowships, recognitions, and announcements — including selected LinkedIn highlights.
Featured
Mar 2026
SimPPL into Fast Forward 2026
SimPPL selected into the Fast Forward 2026 Tech Nonprofit Accelerator in San Francisco, joining a cohort chosen from hundreds of global applicants. The program will support our work scaling Arbiter and SimPPL’s trust & safety tools.
Feb 2026
Inaugural Gustav Struve Fellow at Mannheim
Moved to Germany to join the University of Mannheim as the inaugural Gustav Struve Fellow in Global Responsible AI, working with Marc Ratkovic. Teaching a semester-long course on AI Product Development where students build social-listening tools with newsrooms.
Oct 2025
Arbiter beta launch
First beta launch of Arbiter — a single product Swapneel and I have been envisioning for over three years, finally onboarding users. Built by the SimPPL engineering team, many of whom started as fellows and interns. The immediate impact is exhilarating.
Sep 2025
Joined the CAIDP AI Policy Clinic
After four years building open-access tools for civic integrity, health equity, and digital safety at SimPPL, expanding into the policy side — understanding how technology impacts people and how we ensure it serves the public good.
Timeline
- Joined a fishbowl session on AI and the future of journalism at the International Press Institute Media Innovation Festival in Vienna, sharing how SimPPL’s Arbiter platform supports investigative reporting in algorithmically shaped information ecosystems.
- AI Product Development students build prototype for newsroom AI research. Mansi Sawant, Nishit Suthar, and Adrian Hagen, students in my Mannheim course, are measuring how Google AI Overviews shape what reporters search for and what gets published — in partnership with newsrooms.
- Hosted Savannah Allessandra Cozzi as a guest lecturer in my AI Product Development class at Mannheim, on networking and personal branding for early-career builders.
- Seven weeks into my first course at Mannheim: four student teams are now prototyping with newsroom partners on platform-harm tracing, AI Overviews, and data donation. Sayli Pednekar joined this week to talk UI/UX for AI tools.
- Coffee chat at DW Akademie (courtesy Steffen Leidel) with journalists and fact-checkers; rolled out an early version of Arbiter’s claims identification and sourcing features to beta users.
- SimPPL selected into the Fast Forward 2026 Tech Nonprofit Accelerator in San Francisco, joining a cohort of leading tech nonprofits chosen from hundreds of global applicants.
- Moved to Germany to join the University of Mannheim as the inaugural Gustav Struve Fellow in Global Responsible AI, working with Marc Ratkovic and teaching a semester-long course on AI Product Development and Entrepreneurship.
- SimPPL’s Arbiter platform presented by Himanshu Beniwal at the EkStep Foundation Pavilion during the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi.
- Attended the #GTSInnovationDialogue, co-hosted by Carnegie India and the Ministry of External Affairs as an official pre-summit event of the India AI Impact Summit 2026; discussed frameworks for AI-adoption use cases and shared learnings from scaling Arbiter and Sakhi.
- Completed the intensive 12-week AI Policy Clinic at the Center for AI and Digital Policy, delivering an updated country assessment of Malta for the CAIDP 2026 AI & Democratic Values Index.
- Attended the Mozilla Foundation RCC India pre-summit on Responsible AI in Higher Education in Kochi; presented SimPPL’s NextGenAI Fellowship and co-led a design-thinking session with Dr. B. Spoorthi.
- Presented Malta’s country assessment in Week 10 of the CAIDP AI Policy Clinic with co-researchers Pritika Marguerite Magima (lead), Ethan Ward, Betül Kübra Ekinci, and Erugo Precious.
- First beta launch of Arbiter — a milestone three years in the making, onboarding the first wave of users.
- Wrapped the Global Changemakers Summit 2025: presented prototypes against UN SDGs alongside 50 Changemakers from 28 countries on health, education, gender equality, climate, and peace.
- Attended TASI 2025 — the Pre-Summit on Trust and Safety in India in New Delhi (October 7–8), convening civil society, industry, academia, and government on safer digital spaces.
- SimPPL selected into the UNDP AI Trust & Safety Reimagination Programme cohort, collaborating with global organizations to trace and mitigate digital harms for vulnerable populations.
- Participated in the UK–India AIxcelerate Summit (Sandpit), collaborating with UK–India builders on a responsible-AI fintech framework for digitally marginalized communities.
- Joined the Center for AI and Digital Policy AI Policy Clinic as a Research Group Member, expanding from tool-building at SimPPL into AI policy research and benchmarking.
- Joined SheLEADS: Pathways to Employment as a mentor — a Commonwealth of Learning (COL-CEMCA) and Bharat Innovation Global initiative empowering 1,000 young women from Tier-II and Tier-III cities across India.
- Panelist at LIRNEasia’s Day of Information Disorder in Colombo, presenting Arbiter on the closing AI panel; SimPPL has analyzed 250M+ posts to surface state-backed disinformation networks.
- Invited speaker, CS Colloquium at Ashoka University: AI Against Misinformation.
- Presented Sakhi at the MIT Decentralized AI Summit (April 14–16).
- Spoke at MisinfoCon by Tattle Civic Technologies on monitoring coordinated information operations in the Global South; presented SimPPL’s narrative-spread and influence-measurement tools alongside Sakhi’s GenAI maternal health-literacy work (live with 300+ families across rural India and Bangladesh).
- Co-founder Smriti Bhaya named finalist at the Commonwealth Youth Awards for Sakhi.
- Delivered a two-day capacity-building workshop with Nest Center 4 Journalism Innovation in Mongolia (with support from DW Akademie): social listening, AI tooling, web-scale data collection, toxicity and sentiment analysis, and a Telegram-network monitoring case study.
- Presented SimPPL at the Dubai Future Solutions Prototypes for Humanity exhibition, on rebuilding digital trust through cross-sector collaboration.
- Hosted the Mozilla Responsible Innovation Day at DJSCE (with support from Mozilla RCC India): expert talks, networking, and a tech challenge for responsible-tech ideas.
- Left Bombora and joined SimPPL full-time as Co-founder and Product Lead.
- Joined as a Google Responsible AI Fellowship mentor and lead mentor for the Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge Fellowship.