Varun Sampath Kumar
Position:
Ph.D. Student
Categories:
Mentors 2026/2027
Location:
Region Syddanmark, University of Southern Denmark
Background
I hold a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Data Science, where my project thesis revolved around Federated Learning and Distributed Clustering Algorithms. I have 1.5 years of industry experience at KLA, where I developed large-scale analytics systems using Spark, DuckDB, Kafka, and Ray, and contributed to self-supervised foundation models for semiconductor wafer images. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student researching machine unlearning, AI safety, and mechanistic interpretability in large language and vision-language models.
Motivation
I am motivated to join the DDSA Mentoring Programme as a mentor because I enjoy helping others grow academically and professionally. My experience spans both industry and academia, including large-scale data and AI systems development and Ph.D. research in machine unlearning, AI safety, and mechanistic interpretability. I hope to share practical and research insights, support students and early-career professionals in navigating career decisions, and contribute to a stronger, more connected data science community in Denmark while learning from diverse perspectives.
Skills, expertise and interests
- Data analytics
- MLOps
- Artificial Intelligence
- Good Coding Practices
- Natural Language Processing
- High-performance computing
- Image analysis
- Text analysis
- Complex systems
- Deep learning
- Image processing
- Computer vision
- Machine learning