Varad Bhatnagar

About Varad Bhatnagar

I am currently working as an Applied Scientist II at Microsoft Turing where I work on improving the quality of Microsoft Enterprise Copilot. I work on making LLMs better aligned with human preferences. Previously I worked as a Research Engineer II at IBM Research Lab, India in the area of AI for Code. I contributed significantly towards building AI capabilities in WatsonX Code Assistant. In this role, I also worked on research problems in code translation and data mixing. I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay where I worked as a Research Assistant in the Fake News Detection Research Group led by Prof Kameswari Chebrolu, Prof S. Sudarshan and Prof Soumen Chakrabarti. I worked on automating and improving fact-checking pipelines using State-of-the-Art NLP models and Information Retrieval techniques as part of my Masters Thesis. As part of R&D projects, I worked with Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya on hateful and abusive content detection and with Prof. Preethi Jyothi on multimodal caption alignment. My research interests are automated fact-checking, applications of NLP in social media and AI for Code. I have published work in COLING, INTERSPEECH, Neurocomputing and (Workshop) among others.

Experience

1. Applied Scientist 2

   Microsoft

   Jul 2024 — Present · Bengaluru, IN

   Part of Turing team within Microsoft Search, Assistant, and Intelligence (MSAI), which powers the Microsoft 365 Copilot.[ Sep 25-] Bridging the gap between open source and OpenAI models on reasoning and tool use.[ Jul 24 - Aug 25 ] Training LLMs to generate clickable follow up questions to the user queries which are relevant and engaging.Skills - Training Data Curation - Prompting, Rejection Sampling. Post-training: SFT, RM, PPO. Evaluations - LLM as a Judge, A/B Testing.

Education

• Savitribai Phule Pune University

  Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Information Technology

• Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

  Master's degree, Computer Science and Engineering