Ken Gu

NLP and HCI Researcher


ken-gu.jpeg
Somewhere on the UW campus

(Go Dawgs! 🐶)


I am a fourth year 😮 PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where I am advised by Tim Althoff.

My research focuses on the development and evaluation of AI agents that enhance data-driven science, with a particular emphasis on improving the quality and robustness of scientific analyses. Previously, I explored how AI-powered tools can support data analysts in authoring more reproducible and reliable analyses. My broader interests include Natural Language Processing and Human-AI Interaction in the context of data science. See my past projects below!

Previously, I graduated with a BS in Computer Science from UCLA where I started my research journey studying graph deep learning problems. Between my bachelor’s and the start of my PhD, I was an applied research scientist at Georgian, a venture capital firm that invests in growth-stage start-ups. During my PhD, I have had the opportunity to intern at Tableau Research and the Visual and Data Analytics (VIDA) group at Microsoft Research.


Selected Publications

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
    arXiv PDF Code Website
  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
    arXiv PDF Code
  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
    arXiv PDF

2021

  1. naccl2021.png
    A Package for Learning on Tabular and Text Data with Transformers
    Ken Gu , and Akshay Budhkar
    NAACL Workshop on Multimodal Artificial Intelligence 2021
    As of September 2023, the toolkit has been downloaded over 43,000 times!
    PDF Blog Code

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!