Luka Bekavac is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of St. Gallen (HSG), Switzerland, and a member of the CoCoDa project.
His research focuses on auditing Very Large Online Platforms: developing empirical and technical methods to examine how their design produces systemic risks, and establishing what independent scrutiny of these systems actually requires.
A central interest in his work is the gap between the data platforms make available for auditing and the evidence auditors need. He studies how far platform-provided research access falls short of that standard, and builds audit methods that do not depend on platform cooperation, from sock-puppet audits to code-level audits of recommendation pipelines. He is equally concerned with whether more decentralised and open architectures might address these risks at the root of platform design, rather than through auditing after the fact.