Percy Liang
Percy Liang is an American computer scientist whose research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, and foundation models. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and is the Director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models.
Education
Liang received a Bachelor of Science degree in 2004 and a Master of Engineering degree in 2005 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received bronze and silver medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011, where his doctoral advisors were Michael I. Jordan and Dan Klein.Academic career
After completing his doctorate, Liang held a postdoctoral position at Google. He later joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he conducts research and teaches courses in artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistical learning theory, and language modeling.Liang is known for his work on semantic parsing, weak and indirect supervision, robustness and generalization in machine learning, and the study of large-scale foundation models. He has also been an advocate for efficient and reproducible research, and is one of the developers of CodaLab Worksheets, a platform for managing computational experiments.
Center for Research on Foundation Models
Liang is the founding Director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models at Stanford. The center focuses on the development, evaluation, and governance of foundation models, including technical, social, and policy considerations. CRFM operates as an interdisciplinary research initiative within Stanford HAI.With CRFM, Liang has supported the development of open source large language models.