creators

Percy Liang: Stanford CRFM Director and CS Professor

Percy Liang is a Stanford computer science professor and director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models, behind SQuAD, the HELM benchmark and Marin.

Percy Liang is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, with a courtesy appointment in Statistics, a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and director of the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models, the group behind the 2021 report that coined the term “foundation model”. Stanford's profile gives his degrees as a BS (2004) and MEng (2005) from MIT and a PhD from UC Berkeley in 2011; his Berkeley dissertation, “Learning Dependency-Based Compositional Semantics”, was advised by Michael I. Jordan and Dan Klein, with Klein chairing the committee. His group built the SQuAD reading-comprehension dataset and HELM, a framework for evaluating language models across many scenarios at once. He now runs Marin, an open lab that trains frontier models in public, registering experiments, failures included, before they run. He teaches CS336, Language Models from Scratch, and built CodaLab Worksheets to track an experiment's provenance. He is a co-founder of Together AI — whose leadership page lists him as a founder — and of Simile AI, which describes itself as simulating human behaviour. Stanford records the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2019), the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2016), an NSF CAREER Award (2016), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2015) and a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2014).

Specialization

foundation models, language model evaluation, natural language processing, open-source AI

Country

United States