Health Communication, Misinformation & Measurement
I study how people encounter health information on algorithmic platforms, and how we can measure that exposure reliably. Trained in computer science at USC, I now work in UCLA's Department of Communication (OASIS Lab), where I build and evaluate LLM pipelines for health misinformation. I also collaborate with Prof. Magdalena Wojcieszak's team at UC Davis and the University of Warsaw on news exposure, and at USC ISI I built the data pipelines behind a public dataset of the 2024 U.S. election on TikTok.
Across these projects I keep returning to one question: what do our classifiers, topic models, and LLM judges actually measure, and who do they miss?
Education
Master of Science in Computer Science
University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering | Los Angeles, CA
GPA: 3.71/4.00 · Coursework: Applied Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Web Search Engines, Database Systems, Analysis of Algorithms, Web Technologies, Multimedia Systems Design.
USC's highest honor for graduating students, recognizing leadership, scholarship, and service.
Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science
NMAM Institute of Technology | Nitte, India
Thesis: Detection and Visualization of Bone Abnormalities on X-ray Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks (Best Project of the University, 2021).
Leadership: Student President; Branch Captain for the Computer Science Department.
Best Outgoing Student of the College and of the Computer Science Department.
Experience
Research
- Audit feasibility: Assessed the feasibility of cross-platform sockpuppet audits of recommendation, search, and AI search features across nine platforms, informing the team's audit planning.
- Celebrity mentions at scale: Matched celebrity mentions across 29,999,224 Facebook news posts (1,112,649 matched), reducing the team's political-classifier workload 27-fold; identified 94,349 duplicate records.
- Measurement validation: Fit a BERTopic model on a GPU cluster and validated it with a web-based word-intrusion test: coders identified the intruder 93.5% of the time, with 86–92% inter-coder agreement. Built an outlet typology and per-celebrity concentration measures.
- Health misinformation on TikTok: Built an LLM classification pipeline (Python, GPT-4o-mini) using zero-shot structured outputs to enforce a six-dimension annotation taxonomy, and analyzed the distribution of high-risk medical claims.
- Evaluating AI replies to cancer misinformation: Implemented eight evaluation metrics comparing Gemini-generated and Reddit community replies (12,663 responses, 380 posts), showing that a single empathy score hid a split between expressed warmth and demonstrated understanding.
- Acknowledged contribution to a cancer-misinformation taxonomy study published in Findings of EMNLP 2026.
- Children's YouTube census: 103,066 videos from channels with more than one million subscribers, verified against reported upload counts, with metadata, a 17,517-video stratified sample, and transcripts.
- 2024 U.S. election on TikTok: Built scraping and preprocessing pipelines (Python, Pandas, Apache Spark) covering 1M+ TikTok and X posts and 10M+ comments, contributing to a public dataset of 3.14 million TikTok videos (WWW '25 Companion).
- Topic modeling: Consolidated 700+ fragmented BERTopic topics into 10 coherent themes, with VADER sentiment and engagement analysis.
- Digital mental health ("Bigorexia"): Co-developed a hierarchical taxonomy distinguishing harmful from recovery-oriented muscle dysmorphia content, and helped build LLaMA- and Gemini-based classifiers to apply it to TikTok at scale (92% precision).
- Led collection and preprocessing of TikTok and cross-platform data, with sentiment-aware topic modeling and multimodal embeddings to characterize how harm and recovery narratives co-occur.
- Classified six common paddy crop diseases from leaf images with ML models and Spark-based Fuzzy C-Means segmentation; published as a CRC Press book chapter.
- Supported 600+ students over two semesters: office hours, course materials, and help with assignments on data modeling, SQL, NoSQL, and MapReduce.
Software Developer
Center for Homelessness, Housing, and Health Equity Research, USC
- Developed five Android applications for field data collection, including the DemoGraphic Count app supporting the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count.
- Built, hosted, and maintained websites for the Center's projects (an Olympics homelessness site, Housing LA, and the Homeless Count site), averaging 12,000 to 15,000 visitors per week.
- Produced GIS and spatial visualizations of homelessness patterns (ArcGIS, GeoJSON) and automated data ingestion with Python.
Website Developer & Maintenance Engineer
Alphonso Consultancy | Udupi, India
- Built responsive interfaces (Angular, JavaScript) with SQL and PHP back ends, improving operational efficiency by 40%.
Project Lead & Intern
Quality Theorem | Bangalore, India
- Led development of an online examination platform (Node.js, MongoDB, REST APIs, Docker).
Publications & Patents
Tracking the 2024 US Presidential Election Chatter on TikTok: A Public Multimodal Dataset
Pinto, Bickham, Salkar, Menezes, Luceri, Ferrara · Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025 (WWW '25), 773–776
View publication
Augmenting Large Language Models with Dense Retrieval Techniques for Enhanced QA Performance
Shetty, Shetty, Menezes · IEEE DISCOVER 2025
Identification and Classification of Paddy Crop Diseases Using Big Data Machine Learning Techniques
Rodrigues, Menezes, et al. · CRC Press (Chapman & Hall), 2021, pp. 47–64
View chapter
Conference PaperDeep Learning Photograph Caption Generator
Shetty et al., Menezes · Springer, Recent Advances in AI and Data Engineering (AIDE 2020), AISC Vol. 1386, 2021
View publication
Acknowledged ContributionBeyond Binary Detection: A Multi-Dimensional Taxonomy of Cancer Misinformation on Reddit
Pessianzadeh et al. · Findings of EMNLP 2026 · Acknowledged for assistance and contributions
View on ACL Anthology
- Automated Brain Tumour Diagnosis System and Method Thereof · No. 202441089819 (2024)
- Method for Analysing Public Sentiment on YouTube Comments · No. 202441065225 (2024)
- An Automated Extraction and Summarization System · No. 202441065150 (2024)
- An E-Commerce Product Comparison System · No. 202441065313 (2024)
Research & Development
Integrated DRAGON with LLaMA-7b-Chat
- Integrated DRAGON (Dense Retriever) with LLaMA-7b-Chat to reduce hallucinations in large language models.
- Employed dense retrieval techniques to ground model responses in accurate evidence from datasets like TriviaQA.
- Achieved up to 59% improvement in answer accuracy compared to baseline generation.
- View Project Document
Brain Tumor Detection from MRI Images
- Developed a CNN model for early detection of brain tumors from MRI scans.
- Implemented robust training pipelines to ensure high sensitivity and specificity in automated diagnostics.
- Achieved 89% test accuracy on held-out MRI data.
Deep Learning Photo Caption Generator
- Created a system using VGG-16 for visual feature extraction and LSTM for sequence prediction.
- Engineered the encoder-decoder architecture to translate visual semantics into natural language descriptions.
- Generated descriptive image captions with high BLEU scores across benchmark datasets.
- View Project Document
Detection & Visualization of Bone Abnormalities
- Executed an ML project using TensorFlow and CNN to identify irregularities on X-ray images.
- Implemented heatmaps and visualization tools to assist clinical professionals in abnormality identification.
- The Project was honored as the top in the department and received university funding for further exploration.
- View Project Document
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
- Built a granular sentiment analysis engine to extract specific product features (aspects) from mobile reviews.
- Utilized NLTK and Scikit-learn to classify sentiments per feature, enabling detailed consumer feedback loops.
- View Project Analysis
Leadership & Involvement
Team Lead | Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count
Led the DemoGraphic Count initiative, coordinating large-scale data collection efforts across Los Angeles to support regional housing and health equity research.
NSS | Better India Mission
Implemented waste management solutions in villages and launched the 'Piggy Bank' project to support homeless individuals and people living with HIV.
Lead Organizer | HackRidea
Orchestrated a 24-hour National Level Hackathon. Managed logistics for 50+ teams and coordinated industry panels.
Paddy Crop Cultivation Drive | Belman, India
2019 – 2022: Revived a paddy field left barren for 15 years, cultivating it across consecutive seasons and donating the entire harvest to homeless and underprivileged families.
Vice President | ICYM, Udupi Diocese
2018 – 2022: Elected Vice President of the Indian Catholic Youth Movement for the Udupi Diocese, and served as Public Relations Officer of the state central council, leading youth-empowerment and social-welfare programs.
Tijuana, Mexico
November 2024: Collaborated with Esperanza to build houses for homeless people, providing hands-on construction and community support.
Colombia
March 2024: Engaged with indigenous Wayuu communities; assisted in building their first sustainable water tank for the village.
Skills & Technologies
AI & Data Intelligence
Engineering & Databases
Infrastructure, Cloud & Tools
Honors & Awards
National Overseas Scholarship
Awarded by the Karnataka State Government to support distinguished postgraduate research abroad (April 2024).
Representative of India
Represented the nation at the Asian Level YCS Conference in Indonesia (July 2019).
Top Data Collector
USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work (May 2023).
Best Project of University
Undergraduate thesis on bone-abnormality detection, NMAM Institute of Technology (March 2021).
Best Outgoing Student
Honored at both the College and CS Department level (April 2021).
Sakura Science Exchange
Selected by Japan Science & Technology Agency for research at Ritsumeikan University (2020).
Outstanding Achievement Award
Highest recognition for holistic excellence, academic rigor, and leadership at NMAMIT (April 2021).
Beyond Research
Photography
First place at a national techno-cultural fest and third at Nitte Pixel. Years spent behind the lens before the research career.
View galleryFootball
Won Under-17 tournaments across the Udupi, Chikmagalur, and Mangalore districts of Karnataka, representing taluk and district teams.
Music & Design
Musician and graphic designer, with creative instincts that sneak into data visualizations (and the occasional website easter egg).