MEGHANA.BHANGE
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> Hello, world. I am —

Meghana
Bhange

Researcher ML Engineer PhD @ ÉTS Montréal · Mila

I work at the intersection of machine learning, privacy, and social impact — building socio-technical systems that let communities (not just individuals) resist algorithmic harm and reclaim agency.

Email Mastodon Scholar Toptal GitHub 📍 Montréal, CA
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About / Research

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My current research investigates Algorithmic Collective Action as a lens for designing socio-technical systems that empower communities — not just individuals — to resist harm and reclaim agency.

I pursue this direction as a PhD researcher under the co-supervision of Prof. Ulrich Aïvodji and Prof. Elliot Creager. I am currently affiliated with the Trustworthy Information Systems Lab (TISL) and Mila — Québec AI Institute as a Student Researcher.

I completed my Master's in Information Technology Engineering at ÉTS Montréal. My thesis focused on building privacy-preserving infrastructure for collective complaint systems, co-supervised by Prof. Aïvodji and Prof. Jean-Marc Robert.

Previously, I worked as a Machine Learning Engineer and still consult via Toptal — contributing to NLP-driven projects like inclusive hiring pipelines (SpaCy, GPT-3, FastAPI) and an automated trading platform integrating technical-indicator strategies.

Foundations of this work

Builds on ideas from Algorithmic Collective Action (Hardt et al. 2023), Protective Optimization Technologies (Kulynych et al. 2018), and Data Leverage (Vincent et al. 2020).

→ Follow the project at meghanabhange.com/posts/aca-research-blog

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Research Interests

5 topics
Algorithmic Collective Action
Privacy-Preserving Systems
Complaint Resolution Systems
AI Ethics & Governance
Natural Language Processing
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Selected Publications

peer-reviewed
2026
Conference · ACM FAccT 2026 ACCEPTED
Crowding Out The Noise: Algorithmic Collective Action Under Differential Privacy
Solanki, R., Bhange, M., Aïvodji, U., & Creager, E.
ACM FAccT 2026 (accepted, to appear) · arXiv:2505.05707
READ →
2025
Journal · Computational Intelligence
Survey on AI Ethics: A Socio-Technical Perspective
Mbiazi, D., Bhange, M., Babaei, M., Sheth, I., Kenfack, P., & Kahou, S. E.
Computational Intelligence, 41(6), e70149 · doi:10.1111/coin.70149
READ →
2025
Workshop · ACA @ NeurIPS ORAL
Conscious Data Contribution via Community-Driven Chain-of-Thought Distillation
Libon, L., Bhange, M., Solanki, R., Creager, E., & Aïvodji, U.
Algorithmic Collective Action Workshop, NeurIPS 2025
2025
Workshop · ACA @ NeurIPS POSTER
Crowding Out The Noise: Algorithmic Collective Action Under Differential Privacy
Solanki, R., Bhange, M., Aïvodji, U., & Creager, E.
arXiv:2505.05707 · ACA @ NeurIPS 2025
READ →
2020
Workshop · SemEval 2020
HinglishNLP at SemEval-2020 Task 9: Fine-tuned Language Models for Hinglish Sentiment Detection
Bhange, M., & Kasliwal, N.
Proc. 14th Workshop on Semantic Evaluation · pp. 934–939
READ →
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meghana.history

$ git log --all
meghana@meghanabhange.com:~/history — zsh — 120×32
⌘T
meghana@meghanabhange.com:~/history$ git log --branch=meghana.history
* cdb3202 — (2026)
paper: Our paper got accepted at ACM FAccT 2026 ACCEPTED
Crowding Out the Noise: Algorithmic Collective Action Under Differential Privacy Rushabh Solanki, Meghana Bhange, Ulrich Aïvodji, Elliot Creager arXiv →
* 125579e — (DEC '25)
paper: Our paper got a poster at ACA @ NeurIPS 2025 POSTER
Crowding Out the Noise: Algorithmic Collective Action Under Differential Privacy Rushabh Solanki, Meghana Bhange, Ulrich Aïvodji, Elliot Creager arXiv →
* 5173c94 — (DEC '25)
paper: Our paper got an oral at ACA @ NeurIPS 2025 ORAL
Conscious Data Contribution via Community-Driven Chain-of-Thought Distillation Lena Libon, Meghana Bhange, Rushabh Solanki, Elliot Creager, Ulrich Aïvodji event →
* 3647bd4 — (DEC '25)
log: Student organizer for ACA Workshop @ NeurIPS 2025
acaworkshop.github.io.
* 4cff62e — (OCT '25)
talk: Gave a talk at IVADO Digital Futures 2025
AI for Working with the Machines: Combating Algorithmic Harms with Collective Action event →
* 57a13dd — (MAY '25)
talk: Presented at 92e Congrès de l'Acfas
Actions collectives algorithmiques : vers une gouvernance participative de l'IA — Colloque 428. event →
* 4e5e5b6 — (MAY '25)
role: PhD Researcher @ ÉTS & Mila
Co-supervised by Prof. Ulrich Aïvodji and Prof. Elliot Creager. Algorithmic Collective Action · Protective Optimisation Technologies.
* 769ab5e — (MAY '25)
log: Starting my PhD at ÉTS Montréal
Co-supervised by Prof. Ulrich Aïvodji and Prof. Elliot Creager, affiliated with TISL Lab and Mila — Québec AI Institute.
* e1e6232 — (APR '25)
log: Completed my Master's at ÉTS Montréal
Finished my M.Eng. in Software and Information Technology Engineering (Winter 2025). Thesis on privacy-preserving complaint resolution using Attribute-Based Credentials and zero-knowledge proofs.
* 97089a0 — (APR '25)
award: Received ÉTS Dean's Academic Scholarship
$1,000 award from the Dean of Studies at École de technologie supérieure for academic performance.
* a19aab6 — (2025)
paper: Journal paper published in Computational Intelligence
Survey on AI Ethics: A Socio-Technical Perspective Dave Mbiazi, Meghana Bhange, Maryam Babaei, Ivaxi Sheth, Patrik Kenfack, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou doi →
* 533b2b8 — (2023)
award: Top essay at Kaggle AI Report 2023
Exploring the Landscape of AI Ethics — selected among global submissions.
* e3a1f63 — (MAY '23)
role: Master's Researcher @ ÉTS
Privacy-preserving complaint resolution using Attribute-Based Credentials and zero-knowledge proofs. Supervised by Prof. Aïvodji & Prof. Robert.
* 33f3d27 — (JAN '23)
role: Freelance ML Engineer @ Toptal
NLP pipelines for inclusive hiring (SpaCy, GPT-3/4, FastAPI) · Algorithmic equity trading platform (Interactive Brokers).
* 11781ae — (2022)
award: Best All-Female Team at UN PET Lab Hackathon
Built a Privacy Enhancing Technologies solution using differential privacy.
* 556ed90 — (2022)
award: 2nd Place at Toptal Hackathon
AI-assisted Cards Against Humanity using Stable Diffusion.
* 4b26c38 — (SEP '21)
role: ML Engineer @ Hunters Security
Analytical ML tools for threat-hunting detectors and anomalous user behaviour across Snowflake and AWS RDS.
* 55a2fb0 — (JUL '20)
role: ML Engineer @ Verloop.io
Intent recognition with sentence-transformers (+40% accuracy) · Multilingual NER service deployed across clients.
* ef7662f — (JUL '19)
talk: Spoke at PyData Bangalore Meetup
Extracting Names from Multi-lingual Conversations — Flair-based multilingual NER. watch →
✓ 19 commits  |  branch: meghana.history
meghana@meghanabhange.com:~/history$

Let's connect.

Open to collaborations on algorithmic collective action, privacy-preserving ML, and socio-technical systems. Always happy to chat.

EMAILmeghanabhange@hey MASTODON@aspiringcat GITHUBmeghanabhange
© 2026 MEGHANA BHANGE · BUILT WITH QUARTO MONTRÉAL · QC · CA

References

  1. Hardt, M., Mazumdar, E., Mendler-Dünner, C., & Zrnic, T. (2023). Algorithmic Collective Action in Machine Learning. ICML.
  2. Kulynych, B., Overdorf, R., Troncoso, C., & Gürses, S. F. (2018). POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies. FAccT 2020.
  3. Vincent, N., Li, H., Tilly, N., Chancellor, S., & Hecht, B. J. (2020). Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public. FAccT 2021.