Hello World! I am Vibhor Agarwal, a Research Scientist in the Responsible AI team at Nokia Bell Labs (Cambridge, UK), where I work at the intersection of NLP and AI safety to understand human-AI interactions and minimize harms and biases in LLMs to make them transparent and trustworthy. I hold a PhD in Natural Language Processing from the University of Surrey, advised by Prof. Nishanth Sastry, and have conducted research at JPMorgan AI Research, Georgia Tech, and Queen Mary University of London. Having held 3 years of professional experience and various research internships, I enjoy translating theoretical insights into scalable, industry-ready solutions and collaborating across research and engineering teams. I am open to collaborations and industrial research discussions in Responsible AI, NLP, and LLM safety.
Previously, I worked as a Site Reliability Engineer at Media.net (Directi) in Mumbai, India for 1.5 years. In June 2020, I graduated with a Computer Science and Engineering (B. Tech.) degree from The LNMIIT, Jaipur. My honours include Best Bachelor's Thesis Award and an overall CGPA of 9.45 out of 10. I was also a Google Summer of Code developer in 2018 and contributed to the open source project, Oppia.
Work Experience
Nokia Bell Labs (Dec 2024 - Present) Research Scientist (Cambridge, UK)
Roku (Jul - Sep 2024) Applied Science Internship (Cambridge, UK)
JP Morgan AI Research (Sep - Dec 2023) NLP Research Internship (London, UK)
Georgia Institute of Technology (Jul - Aug 2023) Visiting Researcher (Atlanta, Georgia, USA)
Queen Mary University of London (Oct 2022 - Apr 2023) Visiting Researcher (London, UK)
Google Summer of Code 2018 (May - Aug 2018) Open Source Developer at The Oppia Foundation (Remote)
Research Publications
I have been fortunate to contribute to a wide range of research directions, including natural language processing, LLMs, graph machine learning, and computational social science and have published in top-tier conferences and journals including ACM Web Conference (WWW), ACM Transactions on the Web, ACL, CIKM, AAAI ICWSM, ACM Web Science, etc. For the full list of publications, please refer to my Google Scholar profile.
GraphNLI: A Graph-based Natural Language Inference Model for Polarity Prediction in Online Debates [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub] Vibhor Agarwal, Sagar Joglekar, Anthony P. Young, and Nishanth Sastry The ACM Web Conference (TheWebConf 2022)
A Graph-Based Context-Aware Model to Understand Online Conversations [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub] Vibhor Agarwal, Anthony P. Young, Sagar Joglekar, and Nishanth Sastry ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB 2023)
Decentralised Moderation for Interoperable Social Networks: A Conversation-based Approach for Pleroma and the Fediverse [Paper] [GitHub] Vibhor Agarwal, Aravindh Raman, Nishanth Sastry, Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2024)
Annobert: Effectively Representing Multiple Annotators’ Label Choices to Improve Hate Speech Detection [Paper] [GitHub] Wenjie Yin*, Vibhor Agarwal*, Aiqi Jiang*, Arkaitz Zubiaga, and Nishanth Sastry International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2023)
Improving the Detection of Multilingual Online Attacks with Rich Social Media Data from Singapore [Paper] Janosch Haber, Bertie Vidgen, Matthew Chapman, Vibhor Agarwal, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Yong Keong Yap, Paul Röttger Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023)
"Way back then": A Data-driven View of 25+ years of Web Evolution [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub] Vibhor Agarwal and Nishanth Sastry The ACM Web Conference (TheWebConf 2022)
Under the Spotlight: Web Tracking in Indian Partisan News Websites [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub] Vibhor Agarwal*, Yash Vekaria*, Pushkal Agarwal, Sangeeta Mahapatra, Shounak Set, Sakthi Balan, Nishanth Sastry, and Nicolas Kourtellis 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021)
Differential Tracking Across Topical Webpages of Indian News Media [Paper] [Dataset] [GitHub] Yash Vekaria*, Vibhor Agarwal*, Pushkal Agarwal, Sangeeta Mahapatra, Sakthi Balan Muthiah, Nishanth Sastry, and Nicolas Kourtellis 13th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci 2021)
A Metadata-based Event Detection Method using Temporal Herding Factor and Social Synchrony on Twitter Data [Paper] Nirmal Sivaraman, Vibhor Agarwal, Yash Vekaria, and Sakthi Balan 15th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2021)
Video Surveillance System for Female Security using Keras Vibhor Agarwal Poster presented at The PyCon US 2020, PA, USA
Awards & Achievements
Received Turing Grant for visiting Georgia Tech in Summer 2023.
Received Ultimate Web Science Quiz Award at ACM WebSci 2021.
Received funded PhD studentship at University of Surrey, UK.
Received the Best Bachelor’s Thesis Award in the graduated class of 2020 at LNMIIT, Jaipur, India.
Awarded PyCon US 2020 scholarship to attend the largest Python Conference in the world and present my poster titled, "Video Surveillance System for Female Security using Keras"
Quarter Finalist in India Innovation Challenge Design Contest’ 2018 organised by Department of Science and Technology and IIM Bangalore for our robust ‘Pro-active Video Surveillance System’
Awarded Meritorious Certification and Scholarship for securing position in top 1 percentile at LNMIIT, Jaipur
Awarded Certificate of Appreciation for Google Summer of Code’ 18 at LNMIIT, Jaipur
Earned Silver Medal at State level Mental Ability Competition (Abacus)
Research Talks & Conferences
British Telecom (BT Group): Gave a research talk in Responsible AI at BT in November 2025.
North Carolina State University: Gave a research talk in AI Institute, NCSU in September 2023.
Georgia Institute of Technology: Gave a research talk in August 2023.
Queen Mary University of London: Gave a research talk in December 2022.
ELLIS Cambridge Summer School: Presented my poster in July 2022.
King's College London: Gave a research talk in April 2022.
ACL 2021, 2022, 2023: Received Diveristy and Inclusion scholarship to attend this top NLP conference.
SIGIR 2021: Participated as a student volunteer in the conference.
WebSci 2021: Presented our paper "Differential Tracking Across Topical Webpages of Indian News Media".
ICWSM 2021: Presented our paper "Under the Spotlight: Web Tracking in Indian Partisan News Websites".