Varun Rao
Research Intern at Microsoft
New York City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolVarun Rao is a PhD student at Princeton researching the social impacts of AI on labor and building tools to decentralize platform power as part of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He combines rigorous academic research—published across CHI, FAccT, CVPR, NAACL and more—with hands-on industry experience building multimodal ML systems at Amazon, AWS Bedrock, and Apple, focusing on explainability, retrieval-augmented models, and OCR. His work has earned an Outstanding Paper Award at COLING and has driven production-facing projects that balance product goals with accountable, privacy-aware model design. Varun has also contributed to policy-focused research through fellowships and internships (CDT, Microsoft FATE), blending technical depth with governance and transparency perspectives. Based in the NYC area, he brings nine years of experience bridging computer vision, NLP, usable privacy, and platform accountability—often surfacing non-obvious tensions between deployment constraints and user-centered privacy needs.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering - BE Computer Science and Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering - BE Computer Science and Engineering at PES UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Princeton UniversityMaster of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at University of Southern CaliforniaMaster of Science - MS Computer Engineering, Master of Science - MS Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon UniversityICSE Class 10, ICSE Class 10 at Vidyashilp AcademyCBSE Class 12, CBSE Class 12 at Delhi Public School, Bangalore North
Github Skills (35)
google-colaboratory9
visual-question-answering9
visual-recognition8
segmentation8
face-recognition7
knn7
face-detection7
object-detection6
computer-vision6
sequence6
clip6
prompt-tuning6
deep-learning5
prompt5
multimodal5
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
varunnrao/NTon-Pattern
Nov 2017 - Dec 2017
Contributions:80 pushes, 3 branches, 1 issue in 14 days
amzn/image-misspell-coling2020
Oct 2020 - Dec 2020
Contributions:5 commits, 3 pushes in 1 month
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