Ken Gu


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Somewhere on the UW campus

(Go Dawgs! 🐶)


I am a 4th-year 😮 PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Washington advised by Tim Althoff and a student researcher at Google Research.

My research focuses on the development and evaluation of Language Model agents for data-driven scientific discovery. My broader interests are in systematically evaluating agents, developing scientific understanding of their behavior, and uncovering foundational insights to guide principled improvements.

Previously, I graduated with a BS in Computer Science from UCLA where I studied graph deep learning and was an applied research scientist at Georgian, a venture capital firm that invests in growth-stage start-ups. Earlier in my PhD, I explored AI tools for reproducible and reliable data analyses. I have also had the opportunity to intern at Tableau Research and the Visual and Data Analytics (VIDA) group at Microsoft Research.


Selected Publications

2025

  1. radar-teaser.png
    RADAR: Benchmarking Language Models on Imperfect Tabular Data
    Ken Gu , Zhihan Zhang, Kate Lin, Yuwei Zhang, Akshay Paruchuri, and 16 more authors
    Preprint 2025

2024

  1. blade.png
    BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science
    Ken Gu , Ruoxi Shang, Ruien Jiang, Keying Kuang, Richard-John Lin, and 11 more authors
    EMNLP Findings 2024
  2. woz2023.png
    How Do Data Analysts Respond to AI Assistance? A Wizard-of-Oz Study
    Ken Gu , Madeleine Grunde-McLaughlin, Andrew M. McNutt, Jeffrey Heer, and Tim Althoff
    CHI 2024
  3. msr2023-2.png
    How Do Analysts Understand and Verify AI-Assisted Data Analyses?
    Ken Gu , Ruoxi Shang, Tim Althoff, Chenglong Wang, and Steven M. Drucker
    CHI 2024

Updates

Oct 2024 🎙️ Gave an invited talk on BLADE at AI2. I enjoyed the insightful discussions that followed, especially on how we can approach evaluation for data-driven science and open-ended tasks.
Sep 2024 🍂 Thrilled to start an internship at Google Research, focusing on agents for personal health data and building upon insights from our BLADE benchmark!
Sep 2024 ☀️ Just wrapped up a learning-filled internship at Tableau Research collaborating with Srishti Palani, Philippe Laban, and Vidya Setlur.
Jan 2024 🧙 Excited to share that two papers on understanding human-AI collaboration in data science have been accepted to CHI 2024!! One stems from my internship with Microsoft Research last summer, and the other is a Wizard-of-Oz study conducted with collaborators at UW, where we acted as LLM data analysis assistants.
Jun 2023 🏔 Started my internship at Microsoft Research with Chenglong Wang and Steven Drucker!
Apr 2023 🇩🇪 Attended CHI 2023 in Hamburg, Germany! This was my first in-person conference and my first time in Europe!