Hi, my name is Varin Sikka
I'm a student at Stanford University.
This site is a collection of my writing, projects, etc. across topics like AI, climate change, and linguistics. Things marked WIP are still in progress. Thanks for visiting!
Blog
Artificial Intelligence
Why we're a long way from accurate machine translation
August 21, 2023
LLMs show a lot of potential in their use for translation, but the mechanics of how models handle language reveal significant gaps.
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Linguistics
The Hardest Language to Read? WIP
July 21, 2023
A deep dive into Khmer — its script, phoneme inventory, and consonant clusters — and my argument for why it's the toughest language to learn.
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Climate Change
Climate Change: Analyzing Other Solutions
January 25, 2022
An interactive overview of how effective man-made solutions for carbon capture are in mitigating climate change.
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Climate Change
Planting trees to deal with climate change
November 4, 2021
How many trees do we need to plant to offset our carbon emissions? An overview using Fermi estimates for tree-planting numbers.
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Climate Change
World Temperature Anomaly Map WIP
March 30, 2026
Interactive world map showing daily temperature anomalies for 2025 — how much warmer or cooler each location's high was compared to the 1991–2020 average. Powered by ERA5 reanalysis data.
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Linguistics
Language Guessing Game WIP
June 16, 2025
Listen to audio clips from around the world and guess the language by clicking a map. Multiple difficulty levels rangin from major world languages to rare regional ones.
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Linguistics
Sound Correspondences in Austronesian and Kra-Dai Cognates
June 24, 2024
Presented at 16-ICAL (International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics) in June 2024. A research paper examining sound correspondences between two major Southeast Asian language families and what they show about historical linguistic contact.
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Climate Change
Report: CO2 Removal - The Basics, and Next Steps
September 21, 2023
A policy-oriented report on direct air capture technology — the background science, the current state of deployment, and how it can be scaled.
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