I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Princeton Center for Information and Technology Policy where I work with Dr. Andrés Monroy-Hernández. I earned my doctorate in Information Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I was advised by Dr. Brian Keegan. I hold a bachelors of arts in statistics and in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where my senior thesis was supervised by Dr. Peter Kuhn.
If you’re interested in participatory design, workplace technologies, or labor and technology policy, please feel free to get in touch!
Publications
Going Beyond the Gig: An Ecological Approach to Studying and Intervening in the Gig Economy
Doctoral Thesis
FairFare: A Tool for Crowdsourcing Rideshare Data to Empower Labor Organizers
Dana Calacci*, Varun Nagaraj Rao*, , Catherine Di, Kok Wei Pua, Andrew Schwartz,
Danny Spitzberg, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández
(* = Equal Contribution)
TOCHI '26 | ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
FareShare: A Tool for Labor Organizers to Estimate Lost Wages and Contest Arbitrary
AI and Algorithmic Deactivations
Just Accepted to CSCW'26
Varun Nagaraj Rao, , Andrew Schwartz, Amna Liaqat
Dana Calacci, and Andrés Monry-Hernández
CSCW '26 | ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
and Social Computing
Understanding Human Intervention in the Platform Economy: A case study of an indie food delivery service
, Ngan Chiem, Nikoo Karbassi, Yuhan Liu, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández
CHI '23 | ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Rideshare transparency: Translating gig worker insights on ai platform design to policy
Varun Nagaraj Rao, , Eesha Agarwal, Dana Calacci, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández
CSCW '25 | ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
and Social Computing
The World Wide recipe: A community-centred framework for fine-grained data collection and
regional bias operationalisation
🏆 Best Paper Honorable Mention
Jabez Magomere, Shu Ishida, Tejumade Afonja, Aya Salama, Daniel Kochin, Foutse Yuehgoh, Imane Hamzaoui, Raesetje Sefala, Aisha Alaagib,
, Beatrica Marchegiania, Elizaveta Semenova, Lauren Crais, Siobhan Mackenzie Hall
FAccT ' 25 | ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
The Human Labour of Data Work: Capturing Cultural Diversity through World Wide Dishes
Siobhan Mackenzie Hall, , Raesetje Sefala, Foutse Yuehgoh, Aisha Alaagib,
Imane Hamzaoui, Shu Ishida, Jabez Magomere, Lauren Crais, Aya Salama, Tejumade Afonja
CSCW '25 |
ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
QuaLLM: An LLM-based framework to extract quantitative insights from online forums
Varun Nagaraj Rao, Eesha Agarwal, , Dana Calacci, Andrés Monroy-Hernández
NAACL 2025 | Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Worker Data Collectives as a means to Improve Accountability, Combat Surveillance and Reduce Inequalities
Jane Hsieh, Angie Zhang, Seyun Kim, Varun Nagaraj Rao, , Alexandra Mateescu,
Rafael Do Nascimento Grohmann, Motahhare Eslami, Haiyi Zhu
Extended Abstracts in CSCW '24 |
Companion Publication of the 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
Provocation: Who benefits from" inclusion" in Generative AI?
, Nari Johnson, Siobhan Mackenzie Hall
Eval Eval at NEURIPS '24 | Evaluating Evaluations Workshop at NEURIPS 2024
Lessons from Workers' Inquiry: A Sociotechnical Approach to Audits of Algorithmic Management Systems
XRDS Magazine | XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students
Passwords and python: introducing security concepts in lower-division programming
Casey Fiesler, , Joshua Paup
EngageCSEdu | ACM EngageCSEdu
"Hey, Can You Add Captions?": The Critical Infrastructuring Practices of Neurodiverse People on TikTok
Ellen Simpson, , Bryan Semaan
CSCW '23 | ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
and Social Computing
Work Experience
Post-doctoral Fellow | Princeton Center for Information and Technology Policy | Sept 2025 - Present
Leading an independent research agenda investigating accountability infrastructures for algorithmic technologies in local government regulation and enforcement
Doctoral Researcher | University of Colorado, Boulder Information Science | Aug 2020 - June 2025
Completed doctoral thesis on how workers refuse, resist, and repair precarious working conditions in the gig economy.
Doctoral Research Intern | Microsoft Research - Teachable AI Experiences | May 2024 - Aug 2024
Investigated how to support disabled community participation in designing and evaluating image generation models
Doctoral Research Intern | Microsoft Research - Social Media Collective | June 2023 - Aug 2023
Investigated how small and medium enterprise leverage online platform ecosytem to support entrepreneurship
Talks
From Platform Appeals to Public Accountability: Developing Local Government Capacity for Algorithmic Oversight
Talk on developing regulatory capacity for accountability in automated decision-making systems.
Princeton Center for Information and Technology Policy Seminar
video
abstract
Towards Crowdsourced Audits of Algorithmic Management Systems
Invited talk at the Oxford Institute on supporting participatory algorithmic audits.
Oxford Internet Institute
slides
Big Data in Contemporary Labor Advocacy
Gave an invited talk on the role of quantitative data in supporting contemporary labor advocacy.
Princeton Technology and Ethics Seminar
slides
Longer Bio
I'm interested in figuring out how to support everyday people in the design and governance of the technologies that impact them. I co-founded the Workers Algorithm Observatory to build and maintain tools that help workers collect and utilize data to investigate black-box algorithmic management systems. You can read more about our data collection infrastructure, FairFare, here, and how we extend this infrastructure to support workers in recouping lost wages here.
I believe that doing research with community members is essential to expanding the way we know about algorithmic harms. I investigated how to support socially marginalized communities in curating datasets of cultural objects, and demonstrated how these novel datasets are essential to operationalizing notions of harm and bias that are overlooked in SOTA evaluation datasets for generated images. While I strongly believe in the importance of participation in designing systems, I recognize that participation can be burdensome.
I seek to translate my training as an information scientist into impact outside of academia by participating in the technology policy discourse. I contributed to the drafting of and testified for bills governing algorithmic technologies. I served as an expert witness in a lawsuit, testifying to the importance of transparency disclosures in algorithmically-mediated marketplaces for consumer and worker well-being. My postdoctoral research focuses on identifying gaps in knowledge when regulating workplace technologies and facilitating academic-policy collaborations to address those gaps.
When I'm not working, I'm usually baking up a storm in my kitchen. I always have frozen chocolate chip cookie dough on hand for emergencies, of course 🍪