Kavel Rao

I am undergraduate computer science student and NASA Space Grant scholar at the University of Washington. I’m currently in Zurich, Switzerland for an exchange semester at ETH Zurich, where I’m finishing up my degree and traveling around Europe. Starting in Spring 2024, I’ll be continuing as a masters student through the combined BS/MS computer science program at UW. My interests are in using software and AI for social good, and I’m always exploring to find more areas and applications that call to me!

My first research project jointly authored with Liwei Jiang in Yejin Choi’s lab was accepted to EMNLP Findings 2023 - read the paper here! I’m looking forward to pursuing future projects focusing on novel explainable, creative, and efficient AI systems and uses that benefit humanity.

I’ll soon be an intern at Databricks in the upcoming summer of 2024. In the summer of 2023, I was an intern in Stripe’s risk organization, improving tools for risk analysts to investigate suspicious merchants on the platform. From 2020 to 2022, I worked as a software engineering intern at Conversica, where I built platforms powering AI model operations, including natural language understanding and generation.

Some of my hobbies are rock climbing, reading (follow me on Storygraph), and hiking (read my WTA trip reports).