Our CTO’s passion for fairness and transparency, work at Stanford Vision Lab, and more
Apoorva Dornadula is the CTO and Co-Founder of Viralspace. Before Viralspace, she built a strong technical background at UC Berkeley and Stanford, including at Fei-Fei Li’s image understanding group in the Stanford Vision Lab. She works on our core technology and has been part of the journey since day one. Read about her passions for fairness and explainability, Harry Potter, and more!
Around two years ago, I was about to graduate from UC Berkeley and was in the process of deciding where to go for my Masters in Computer Science. I’ve always been interested in building and creating things, from websites, to animated shorts, to board games. For this reason, I decided to attend Stanford for its strong ties to the entrepreneurship community and its stellar professors in the ML/AI space. Most of my background up until this point was in computer security, web development, and machine learning, but computer vision and explainable ML models had always peaked by interest. I was just blown away by the dire consequences currently present in products using AI today because of biased datasets, engineers, and models. This led me to join the Stanford Vision Lab, where I worked on developing explainable scene graph generation models in the Stanford Vision Lab.
When Hiro first pitched the idea of Viralspace, I wasn’t sure if I’d be a good fit because I didn’t have experience in the marketing space. However as I did more research in the space, I realized that this field, more than ever, needs understanding around what kind of content is performing and for which audiences. In particular, I was interested in uncovering biases brands were unknowingly perpetuating through their content. I thought this was an extremely interesting, and complex problem that would need a diverse set of technologies and skill sets to be able to tackle. I’m so excited to be a part of a company that is responsibly bring this technology to enterprise and am looking forward to growing this company with our amazing team. At Viralspace, we have the opportunity to change the way enterprises assess their assets and can bring about a positive change in the way users interact with AI models.
At Viralspace, we have the opportunity to change the way enterprises assess their assets and can bring about a positive change in the way users interact with AI models.
At Viralspace, I work on building the core technology that enables engagement prediction and build models to deeply understand visual assets. I work on making our models more explainable, transparent, and think about the best way to inform clients where predictions and insights could be unfair or incorrect. What I’ve enjoyed the most is directly working with clients to understand their needs and thoughts and thinking about how we can build a product that will help them make responsible and data driven decisions. At a big company, I would not be able to get this level of access to customers nor would I be able to have such a huge impact in shaping the product/technology itself. Finally, our team is amazing! Never have I worked with such a passionate and diverse group of people, who I learn from everyday.
Outside of work, I love solving jigsaw puzzles, traveling to new places, learning new sports (currently trying to rollerblade), and learning new languages (currently learning Greek). I’m a huge Harry Potter & FRIENDS fan :)
We’re hiring! Want to join Viralspace and work directly with Apoorva on ML research projects or back-end engineering? Check out our careers page or email apoorva@viralspace.ai.
