Percy Liang is an American expert in computer science. His work includes studying machine learning, natural language processing, and foundation models. He teaches computer science at Stanford University and leads the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM).
Education
Liang earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 2004 and a Master of Engineering degree in 2005 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He won bronze and silver medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). In 2011, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral advisors were Michael I. Jordan and Dan Klein.
Academic career
After earning his doctorate, Liang worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Google. He later became a professor at Stanford University, where he studies and teaches about artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistical learning theory, and language modeling.
Liang is known for his research on semantic parsing, weak and indirect supervision, how machine learning systems handle different situations and adapt to new problems, and the study of large-scale foundation models. He supports efficient and reproducible research and helped create CodaLab Worksheets, a tool for organizing computational experiments.
Liang started the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM). This center studies how to create, test, and manage foundation models, including technical, social, and policy issues. CRFM is a research project that involves different fields at Stanford HAI.
With CRFM, Liang has helped develop open source large language models.
Liang has written articles published in top artificial intelligence and machine learning conferences, including ACL, EMNLP, ICML, and COLT. His work has influenced both theoretical and practical research in natural language understanding and machine learning systems.
Liang has received awards for his research, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, and the Sloan Research Fellowship.