Dr. Siva Mathiyazhagan is the Associate Director of Strategies and Impact at the SAFELab, University of Pennsylvania, and a Lecturer in the school of social work at Columbia University. He strategies and facilitates local-global partnerships to scale SAFELab innovations and research projects to accelerate the impact with local communities and transnational tech-social work researchers. Dr. Siva’s research focuses on a youth-led community-centered transdisciplinary approach to prevent caste and racial bias and misinterpretation of social media posts by BIPOC youth to promote safe and inclusive off and online communities. Dr.Siva co-creates tech social work policies and social work ethical considerations for Artificial Intelligence(AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Metaverse. Dr. Siva Mathiyazhagan is the Founder-Director of the youth-led non-profit Trust for Youth and Child Leadership (TYCL) International, based in India and the USA. He serves as a TYCL representative to the United Nations. He has a master’s in Social Work (MSW) and a PhD. in Social Work, specialized in child-centered community development from Pondicherry Central University, India. He loves to travel in the coastal areas and listens to Tamil traditional folk music.
Twitter: @MDSShiva
Assembly Fellowship Project:
Young people from historically marginalized communities are disproportionately subject to unjust punitive actions based on their social media content. Because social media posts in these communities can be culturally-specific and hyper-local in nature, they can be misinterpreted, leading to real-life consequences. Siva Mathiyazhagan and the SAFElab have developed InterpretMe, a web tool that seeks to tackle this challenge by asking those reviewing this content to more carefully consider the context of these posts and their own biases when reviewing it before rushing to impose punitive consequences.
