I am Vasudha Varadarajan, a postdoc researcher at CMU’s Language Technologies Institute working on understanding how social cognition surfaces in large language models, its impact on conversations and cultural sensitivity , and the safety risks associated with it, especially in downstream applications such as mental health. I am also interested in using insights from NLP and data science techniques (what we call “neo-GOFAI” - modern applications of good old-fashioned AI and statistical techniques) to study social / psychological phenomena. I am also interested in interpretability and explainability of language models, and exploring NLP for low-resource and code-mixed settings. I did my PhD under the mentorship of H. Andrew Schwartz in the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I am fortunate to be mentored by Maarten Sap and Mona Diab at LTI.

If you have similar interests and would like to work together, please feel free to reach out!