Varuni Shashikala

Varuni's research develops robust software engineering methods to detect and mitigate misinformation in digital systems. Misinformation — the spread of false or misleading content, often at scale through social platforms and AI-generated media — poses significant risks to public health, democratic processes, and societal cohesion. Addressing it demands not just algorithmic solutions but principled software engineering approaches.

The methodology is multi-faceted: case studies are used to analyse misinformation patterns in the wild, software prototyping enables the construction and iterative refinement of mitigation tools, and industry collaboration provides real-world validation of the resulting systems and methods.

The intended outcomes are a practical framework for engineering misinformation-resilient software systems, along with evaluation metrics that allow organisations to assess their resilience to misinformation threats. This work sits at the boundary of software engineering, information quality, and trustworthy AI — contributing to an engineering discipline that society increasingly needs.