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
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