About

Varun Rao is a highly accomplished PhD student at Princeton University, currently working on problems related to privacy and fairness in AI as part of the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). With a Master's degree from both Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Southern California, Varun's research and coursework have focused on security, fairness, and privacy in machine learning and computer vision. Varun has a wealth of experience in the tech industry, having previously worked as an Applied Scientist at Amazon on the Product Assurance, Risk and Security (PARS) ML team. During his time at Amazon, Varun leveraged multimodal deep learning techniques, including computer vision and natural language processing, to help protect customers and build seller trust through explainable and accountable models. Varun's primary goal was to enhance Amazon's capability to understand product information in images and documents to facilitate full automation of compliance operations and meet an increased regulatory burden. Varun has also worked as an intern on the OCR Team at Apple, helping to add handwritten text support. Varun's research has been published in a number of prestigious conferences and journals, including NAACL-HLT Multimodal AI Workshop 2021, PoPETs 2021, COLING 2020, and CVPR VQA/VisDial Workshop 2018. He has also won an Outstanding Paper Award at COLING 2020 for his work titled "Misspelling Detection from Noisy Product Images" (16/644 - top 2.5%). In addition to his academic and industry experience, Varun has also worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Southern California, where he audited the Facebook Ad Library for fairness and transparency issues as they relate to exposure to job opportunities. Varun's technical skills include research and development in AI, ML, computer vision, deep learning, and NLP, as well as experience with Sagemaker. With almost five years of relevant experience, Varun is a highly skilled and accomplished researcher and practitioner in the field of AI and machine learning.