Ken Gu

NLP and HCI Researcher


ken-gu.jpeg
Somewhere on the UW campus

(Go Dawgs! đŸ¶)


I am a third-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 centers on how we can build tailored tools (especially those powered by Large Language Models) to support data analysts in authoring more reproducible and higher quality analyses. Broadly speaking, I am interested in Natural Language Processing and Human-AI Interaction with applications to data science. See my past projects below!

Previously, I graduated with a BS in Computer Science from UCLA where I worked on graph deep learning problems under professor Yizhou Sun and professor Wei Wang. 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. In the summer of 2023, I was a research intern in the Visual and Data Analytics (VIDA) group at Microsoft Research.


Selected Publications

2024

  1. 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
  2. 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

2023

  1. mdebugger_workflow2.png
    Understanding and Supporting Debugging Workflows in Multiverse Analysis
    Ken Gu , Eunice Jun, and Tim Althoff
    CHI 2023
    PDF Code

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

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.
Sep, 2023 🎉 I’ve transitioned to a new website to better highlight my research! Explore my latest findings and projects here.
Jun, 2023 🏔 Started my internship at Microsoft Research with Chenglong Wang and Steven Drucker!
Apr, 2023 đŸ‡©đŸ‡Ș Attended CHI 2023 in Hamburg, Germany! This was my first in-person conference and my first time in Europe!