Ken Gu
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
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. |
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| 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! |