Varun Rao

01About

I'm part of the Responsible AI Evaluation team at Apple and an Affiliate at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. I recently completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University.

At Princeton I was advised by Andrés Monroy-Hernández. My dissertation, Toward Human-Centered, Evidence-Based Policy on AI's Labor Impacts, combined system building and empirical studies to understand and improve AI's impact on society. My Ph.D. centered on two projects: the Workers' Algorithm Observatory, where I built tools like FairFare and FareShare that help gig workers and labor organizers measure and contest algorithmic harms, and OpenCourier, a decentralized protocol for delivery work.

This research helped shape Colorado's SB 24-75, the first U.S. state AI transparency law for algorithmically mediated work, and laid the foundation for the WAO's partnership with the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

Along the way I interned at Microsoft Research (FATE), AWS and Apple, was a Google Policy Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, and worked as an Applied Scientist at Amazon. I care deeply about CS education and mentoring undergraduate researchers.

Research interests

  • Responsible AI & Evaluation
    Measuring how deployed AI systems behave, and for whom.
  • AI & the Future of Work
    Auditing algorithmic management and building tools for workers.
  • Tech Policy
    Turning empirical evidence into legislation and regulation.
  • Human-AI Interaction
    Designing and evaluating LLM-powered tools for people.
  • Platform Transparency
    Accountability for opaque platforms, from rideshare to ads.
  • CS Education
    Concept inventories, curricula, and mentoring.

02News

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03Publications

Societal Impacts of AI, HCI & Tech Policy

  • Under review
    Toward a Science of Collective Dynamics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
    A. Coman, I. X. Belaustegui, G. Ferro, K. Izumi, S. Hachisuka, R. Hashimoto, L. He, H. Huang, I. Jalon, Y. Kido, H. Kuzuoka, Y. Lee, N. Leonard, G. Li, E. Mieczkowski, Y. Ohtsubo, K. Otsubo, V. N. Rao, Y. Strittmatter, T. Takayanagi, K. Wang
    Nature Human Behaviour
  • Under review
    "We do not like to legislate and regulate based on hypotheticals": How Policy Stakeholders Evaluate Evidence about General-Purpose AI
    V. N. Rao, A. Balayn, S. L. Blodgett, A. Caliskan, S. Barocas
    CHI 2027
  • Under review
    How Can LLMs Support Policy Researchers? An Evaluation of an LLM-Assisted Workflow for Analysis of Large-Scale Unstructured Data
    Y. Liu, S. Zhou, J. Kaiser, E. Colby, J. Okwara, M. Wang, V. N. Rao*, A. Monroy-Hernández*
    ACM TOCHISenior author
  • 2026
    What Drivers Want vs. What Drivers Take: A Worker-Centered View of Fairness in Ridehail Platforms
    S. Dalal, V. N. Rao, C. Ao, A. Monroy-Hernández
    AIES 2026
  • 2026
    FareShare: A Tool for Labor Organizers to Estimate Lost Wages and Contest Arbitrary AI and Algorithmic Deactivations
    V. N. Rao, S. Dalal, A. Schwartz, A. Liaqat, D. Calacci, A. Monroy-Hernández
    CSCW 2026 Best Paper Honorable Mention PDF
  • 2026
    Envisioning Alternative Futures for Delivery Work: Toward a Decentralized Network Built on the OpenCourier Protocol
    Y. Liu, V. N. Rao, S. Hwang, J. Vertesi, A. Monroy-Hernández
    CHI 2026 Extended Abstracts PDF Princeton Project
  • 2026
    A Framework to Characterize Reporting on Generative AI Use
    A. Balayn, V. N. Rao, S. L. Blodgett, A. Caliskan, S. Barocas
    CHI 2026
  • 2025
    FairFare: A Tool for Crowdsourcing Rideshare Worker Data to Empower Labor Organizers and Influence Policy
    D. Calacci*, V. N. Rao*, S. Dalal*, C. Di, K. Pua, A. Schwartz, D. Spitzberg, A. Monroy-Hernández
    ACM TOCHI 2025 & CHI 2026 PDF Project CDT blog CITP blog
  • 2025
    Rideshare Transparency: Translating Gig Worker Insights on AI Platform Design to Policy
    V. N. Rao, S. Dalal, E. Agarwal, D. Calacci, A. Monroy-Hernández
    CSCW 2025PDF
  • 2025
    Think Twice Before You Search: Deterrence Messaging Designs to Prevent Searches for Non-Consensual Intimate Images
    V. N. Rao, D. Thakur
    Center for Democracy & Technology Research InsightsReport
  • 2025
    PolicyPulse: LLM-Synthesis Tool for Policy Researchers
    M. Wang, E. Colby, J. Okwara, V. N. Rao, Y. Liu, A. Monroy-Hernández
    CHI Late Breaking Work 2025Senior authorPDF
  • 2025
    Redefining Research Crowdsourcing: Incorporating Human Feedback with LLM-Powered Digital Twins
    A. Chan, C. Di, J. Rupertus, G. Smith, V. N. Rao, M. H. Ribeiro, A. Monroy-Hernández
    CHI Late Breaking Work 2025Senior authorPDF
  • 2025
    GPTFootprint: Increasing Consumer Awareness of the Environmental Impacts of LLMs
    N. Graves, V. Larrieu, Y. T. Zhang, J. Peng, V. N. Rao, Y. Liu, A. Monroy-Hernández
    CHI Late Breaking Work 2025Senior author Princeton Research Day Sustainability AwardPDF
  • 2025
    ConversAR: Exploring Embodied LLM-Powered Group Conversations in Augmented Reality for Second Language Learners
    J. Bendarkawi, A. Ponce, S. Mata, A. Aliu, Y. Liu, L. Zhang, A. Liaqat, V. N. Rao, A. Monroy-Hernández
    CHI Late Breaking Work 2025Senior authorPDF
  • 2024
    Worker Data Collectives as a Means to Improve Accountability, Combat Surveillance and Reduce Inequalities
    J. Hsieh, A. Zhang, S. Kim, V. N. Rao, S. Dalal, A. Mateescu, R. Grohmann, M. Eslami, M. Lee, H. Zhu
    CSCW 2024 WorkshopsPDF
  • 2023
    Discrimination through Image Selection by Job Advertisers on Facebook
    V. N. Rao, A. Korolova
    FAccT 2023Preliminary versions at EAAMO '22 & PLSC '23PDFPress
  • 2021
    "I would have to evaluate their objections": Privacy Tensions between Smart Home Device Owners and Incidental Users
    C. Cobb, S. Bhagavatula*, K. A. Garrett*, A. Hoffman*, V. N. Rao*, L. Bauer
    PETS 2021PDF

Explainable AI & Multimodal Machine Learning

  • 2025
    QuaLLM: An LLM-based Framework to Extract Quantitative Insights from Online Forums
    V. N. Rao, E. Agarwal, S. Dalal, D. Calacci, A. Monroy-Hernández
    Findings of NAACL 2025; CHI 2024 LLMs as Research Tools WorkshopPDF
  • 2024
    RAVEN: Multitask Retrieval Augmented Vision-Language Learning
    V. N. Rao, S. Choudhary, A. Deshpande, R. Satzoda, S. Appalaraju
    arXiv preprintPDF
  • 2021
    A First Look: Towards Explainable TextVQA Models via Visual and Textual Explanations
    V. N. Rao*, X. Zhen*, K. Hovsepian, M. Shen
    Multimodal AI Workshop (MAI), NAACL 2021PDF
  • 2020
    Misspelling Detection from Noisy Product Images
    V. N. Rao, M. Shen
    COLING 2020, Industry Track Outstanding Paper AwardPDF
  • 2018
    Gamification of a Visual Question Answer System
    S. Suresh*, V. N. Rao*, G. Srinivasa
    IEEE T4E 2018; VQA Challenge and Visual Dialog Workshop, CVPR 2018IEEE
  • 2018
    Extracting and Visualizing Character Associations in Literary Fiction using Association Rule Learning
    V. N. Rao, R. Mahale, S. Pai, V. Kumar
    IEEE ICACCI 2018IEEE

Computer Science Education

  • 2025
    Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Dynamic Programming Concept Inventory
    M. Ferland*, V. N. Rao*, A. Arora, F. Reiber, M. Luu, R. Huynh, S. Poulsen, A. Poel, M. Shindler
    SIGCSE 2025PDFSlides
  • 2023
    What is an Algorithms Course? Survey Results of Introductory Undergraduate Algorithms Courses in the U.S.
    M. Luu, M. Ferland*, V. N. Rao*, A. Arora, R. Huynh, F. Reiber, J. Wong-Ma, M. Shindler
    SIGCSE 2023PDF

High Performance Computing

  • 2017
    First Look: Linear Algebra-Based Triangle Counting without Matrix Multiplication
    T. M. Low, V. N. Rao, M. Lee, D. Popovici, F. Franchetti, S. McMillan
    IEEE HPEC 2017 MIT/IEEE/DARPA Graph Challenge Honorable MentionPDF

* Equal contribution. Also on Google Scholar.

04Experience

Industry & policy

  • Responsible AI Evaluation

    Jul 2026 – Present
    Apple · Cambridge, MA

    Leading (directly responsible individual) internal policy development, product, and research efforts on AI safety evaluations of controversial topics (e.g., political neutrality and bias) across Siri AI and Apple Intelligence.

  • Research Intern, FATE Group

    Jun – Aug 2025
    Microsoft Research NYC · Mentors: Solon Barocas, Su Lin Blodgett, Aylin Caliskan, Agathe Balayn

    Designed a conceptual framework for AI use transparency artifacts and led qualitative research with AI policy stakeholders (government, industry, civil society) on how uncertainty about general-purpose AI use shapes regulation.

  • Google Policy Fellow, Content Moderation

    Jan – May 2025
    Center for Democracy & Technology · Washington, DC

    Led the design and evaluation of three deterrence messaging mechanisms (informative, reductive, friction-based) to reduce NCII exposure, with feedback from a working group of 10+ major online platforms, academics, and survivor advocates.

  • Applied Scientist II Intern, AWS Bedrock

    May – Aug 2023
    Amazon Web Services · San Francisco, CA

    Developed a unified retrieval-augmented encoder-decoder vision-language architecture with no pretraining or additional trainable parameters; gains on captioning (+1 CIDEr MSCOCO, +4 CIDEr NoCaps) and VQA (+3% on VQA v2).

  • Applied Scientist II, Multimodal AI

    Feb 2020 – Jul 2021
    Amazon · Product Assurance, Risk and Security · Seattle, WA

    Explainable multimodal text-in-image and classification models to protect customers and build seller trust. Invited talk at AMLC 2020; COLING 2020 Outstanding Paper Award.

  • Computer Vision Intern, Core Recognition

    May – Aug 2019
    Apple · Cupertino, CA

    Improved OCR accuracy by up to 28% and expanded support for handwritten text.

Academic research

  • Affiliate, Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP)

    Jun 2026 – Present
    Princeton University · Princeton, NJ

  • Research Assistant, Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP)

    Aug 2022 – May 2026
    Princeton University · Advisor: Prof. Andrés Monroy-Hernández

    Building tools (e.g., FairFare, FareShare) to understand gig worker concerns, measure and mitigate AI and algorithmic system harms, and generate evidence for AI policy, as part of the Workers' Algorithm Observatory (WAO).

    • Influenced the first state-level AI transparency legislation in the U.S. for algorithmically mediated work (CO SB 24-75); a co-author served as expert witness using our paper as evidence.
    • Foundational research enabling the WAO's partnership with the NYC Dept. of Consumer and Worker Protection, covered by the NYC government and the New York Times.
    • Designed and evaluated human-AI interaction tools (e.g., QuaLLM, Digital Twins, GPTFootprint) with productivity impacts.
    • Partnered with platforms in the Global South to operationalize transparency interventions and evaluate their effect on worker well-being through RCTs (Co-PI on a Gates Foundation–funded grant, $100K).
    • Defined and measured a new form of discrimination through image selection by job advertisers on Facebook.

  • Research Assistant, CyLab Security & Privacy Institute

    Aug – Dec 2019
    Carnegie Mellon University · Advisors: Prof. Camille Cobb, Prof. Lujo Bauer

    Understanding the privacy needs and attitudes of incidental home IoT users through in-person focus groups.

  • Research Assistant, Robotics Institute

    Sep 2018 – May 2019
    Carnegie Mellon University · Advisors: Dr. Donghyun Yoo, Prof. Kris Kitani

    Deep-learning-based 6DoF camera pose estimation from monocular RGB and depth images, state of the art on the 7-Scenes dataset.

  • Undergraduate Research Intern, Electrical & Computer Engineering

    Jun – Jul 2017
    Carnegie Mellon University · Advisor: Dr. Tze Meng Low

    Implemented an exact triangle counting algorithm with a speedup of up to 2000× over the miniTri baseline.

05Education

  • Ph.D., Computer Science

    2022 – 2026
    Princeton University

    Dissertation: Toward Human-Centered, Evidence-Based Policy on AI's Labor Impacts
    Committee: Andrés Monroy-Hernández (advisor), Solon Barocas, Peter Henderson, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Arvind Narayanan

  • M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering

    2019
    Carnegie Mellon University · GPA 3.96/4.0

  • B.E., Computer Science and Engineering

    2018
    PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore · GPA 9.97/10, Rank 1/132 (Gold Medalist)

06Teaching

  • COS 324: Intro to Machine Learning & Junior Research Workshop

    Fall 2025
    Head TA · Profs. Victoria Dean, Ruth Fong, Adji Bousso Dieng · 139 + 45 students

    Course creation, lecturing, and incorporating AI ethics into lectures, precepts, and assignments. Course site

  • EGR 371: Designing the Future of Work

    Spring 2025
    Course Affiliate · Prof. Andrés Monroy-Hernández

    Identified guest speakers, designed an AI ethics role play from my Ph.D. research, and mentored a capstone with an external organization.

  • COS 436: Human-Computer Interaction

    Fall 2024
    TA · Prof. Andrés Monroy-Hernández · Rating 4.26/5

    Defined and mentored research projects, 4 of which were accepted to CHI Late Breaking Work 2025 (32.8% acceptance). Course site

  • COS 598I: Responsible AI in Societal Deployment

    Spring 2024
    TA · Prof. Lydia Liu · Rating 4.67/5

  • COS 350: Ethics of Computing

    Fall 2023
    TA · Prof. Arvind Narayanan · 101 students, first iteration of a new course · Course site

Mentorship

I've been fortunate to work closely with many excellent Princeton undergraduates:

  • Cathy Di
  • Abani Ahmed
  • Angela Li
  • Kyler Zhou
  • Eesha Agarwal
  • Kristoffer Selberg
  • Jessica Ereyi
  • Kok-Wei Pua

07Tech Policy

  • Colorado SB 24-75: the first U.S. rideshare transparency law
    2024
    Influenced the bill language. Now working with NELP on bill language for a federal digital labor platform transparency and accountability bill.
    Bill Policy memo Blog CDT blog
  • Comments on the 2025 National AI R&D Strategic Plan
    2025
    Submitted to the National Science Foundation with Steven Kelts and Andrés Monroy-Hernández, covering the labor impacts of AI.
    Comments Blog
  • Paris AI Action Summit expert consultation
    2025
    CITP/WAO work cited in the Future of Work priorities (p. 99).
    Report
  • EU consultation: "Future-Proof AI Act: Trustworthy General-Purpose AI"
    2024
    Led a response on the labor risks of general-purpose AI.
    Website Response
  • Report to Colorado Independent Drivers United
    2024
    Used FairFare trip data to measure platform take rates.
    Report
  • Supreme Court amicus brief, Gonzalez v. Google
    2022
    Co-author of CITP's brief on Section 230 and recommender systems; contributed the technical explanation of how recommendation systems operate.
    Brief Blog

08Invited Talks

  • The Need for Transparency in AI and Algorithmic Rideshare Platform Decisions
    2025
    Machine Learning + Society (Prof. Orestis Papakyriakopoulos), TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology · also ARTIC, Princeton, Dec 2024
    Slides
  • The Role of Policy in Enhancing Transparency in Rideshare Platforms
    2024
    CITP Conference: Tech Policy, The Next Ten Years
    Slides
  • Empirical Validation of Algorithmic Wage Discrimination in Rideshare
    2024
    Data Driven Social Science Seminar, Princeton
    Slides
  • Making Rideshare Governable
    2024
    National Employment Law Project (NELP)
    Slides
  • Societal Impact of AI on Labor: Studies of Rideshare and Social Media Ad Platforms
    2024
    Designing the Future of Work (Prof. Andrés Monroy-Hernández), Princeton
  • Societal Concerns in Targeted Ad Delivery Algorithms
    2024
    Responsible AI in Societal Deployment (Prof. Lydia Liu), Princeton
  • On Ad Delivery Algorithms
    2023
    Ethics of Computing (Prof. Arvind Narayanan), Princeton
  • Explainable Multimodal TextVQA Models
    2020
    Amazon Machine Learning Conference (AMLC)

09Awards & Honors

  • Best Paper Honorable Mention, CSCW
    2026
    FareShare · awards list
  • Google Policy Fellowship
    2025
    Center for Democracy & Technology
  • Graduate Fellow of Social Data Science
    2024
    Data Driven Social Science Initiative, Princeton
  • FAccT Doctoral Consortium
    2023
  • Outstanding Paper Award, COLING
    2020
    Misspelling Detection from Noisy Product Images (top 2.5%)
  • Gold Medal & Hamsa Kartik Alumni Award
    2018
    Rank 1 in Computer Science, PES University
  • Prof. MRD and Prof. CNR Rao Scholarship
    2014–18
    Top 5 in Computer Science, PES University
  • MIT/IEEE/DARPA Graph Challenge Honorable Mention
    2017
  • Summer Research Fellowship, Indian Academy of Sciences
    2017
  • INSPIRE Scholarship for Higher Education, Govt. of India
    2014
    Top 1% of AISSCE (Class 12)
  • CBSE Certificate of Merit in Computer Science
    2014
    Top 0.1% nationally

10Service

Organizing
Editorial
  • ACM TOCHI Distinguished Reviewer Board · selected among 180 applicants2026
Reviewing
  • CHI'25 '27
  • CSCW'26 '27
  • FAccT'24 '25
  • NeurIPS Ethics'23 '24
  • ACL'22–24
  • EMNLP'22–24
  • NAACL'22 '23
  • SIGCSE'23
  • WebConf'23
  • ACM C&C'24
Community
  • Social Chair, Princeton HCI Group
  • COS Graduate Student Council; led orientation for new MSE and Ph.D. students
  • Office of Campus Engagement Summer Fellow, Princeton2024
Schools & workshops attended
  • Who Counts? Sex and Gender Bias in Data · UCLA2022
  • Graduate Summer School on Algorithmic Fairness · UCLA2022
  • Boston Differential Privacy Summer School · Boston University2022
  • Data Mining and Machine Learning Summer School · IIT Gandhinagar2016

11Press

The New York Times DoorDash settlement with NYC delivery drivers Sep 2026 NYC Mayor's Office Record $131.5 million from DoorDash for delivery workers; DCWP partners with the WAO Sep 2026 Princeton Engineering New tool drives gig workers toward wage transparency Dec 2025 Princeton CITP Meet the Researcher: Varun Rao Apr 2025 Princeton CITP Revolutionizing rideshare: researchers develop FairFare app to empower workers Mar 2025 Princeton SPIA Despite progress, researchers find more potential discrimination in Facebook ads Nov 2023