About

Hi! I’m a staff research scientist & manager at Google, where my team and I develop new methods for machine learning and language understanding.

Prior to this, I completed my Ph.D. at Stanford, advised by Percy Liang in the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group. I completed my undergraduate degree in mathematics at Duke University, where I was advised by David Dunson and Alex Hartemink.

Long-term, I hope to make machine learning so cheap and easy that everyone can use it for their benefit, not just organizations with big datasets or deep pockets. I’m also excited about improving collective intelligence — making society smarter than the sum of its parts.

• Areas of interest: machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, semantic parsing, reinforcement learning, statistics

• Applications of interest: voice user interfaces, natural language interfaces, machine learning in healthcare, recommender systems

Experience

Work

Education

Selected publications

Sorry, I’m not great at keeping this section updated. For a more comprehensive list of recent work, please check out my Google Scholar profile.

• REALM: Retrieval-augmented language model pre-training
  Kelvin Guu*, Kenton Lee*, Zora Tung, Panupong Pasupat, Ming-Wei Chang
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2020
  (* equal contribution)

• Generating Sentences by Editing Prototypes
  Kelvin Guu*, Tatsunori B. Hashimoto*, Yonatan Oren, Percy Liang
  Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2018
  (* equal contribution)

  pdf arxiv slides github codalab bibtex

  @inproceedings{guu2018generating,
    title = {Generating Sentences by Editing Prototypes},
    author = {Guu, Kelvin and Hashimoto, Tatsunori B. and Oren, Yonatan and Liang, Percy},
    booktitle = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)},
    year = {2018},
  }
  

  

• Best paper honorable mention
  Traversing Knowledge Graphs in Vector Space
  Kelvin Guu, John Miller, Percy Liang
  

  Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2015

  pdf arxiv slides codalab bibtex

  @inproceedings{guu2015traversing,
    title = {Traversing Knowledge Graphs in Vector Space},
    author = {Guu, Kelvin and Miller, John and Liang, Percy},
    booktitle = {Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
    year = {2015},
  }
  

  

Other projects

Presentations and tutorials

• Why naive cross-validation can fail for feature selection.
• Presentation on selection and multiple hypothesis testing, based on several great lectures by Emmanuel Candes.
• Presentation on random matrices, prepared for Percy Liang’s reading group.

Collaborators

I have had the privilege of working with and learning from great mentors and collaborators, including:

• Mentors
  • Percy Liang, Associate Professor of Computer Science & Statistics at Stanford
  • Jakob Uszkoreit, Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Google
  • Richard Socher, Chief Scientist at Salesforce
  • David B. Dunson, Professor of Statistics at Duke
  • Debdeep Pati, Associate Professor of Statistics at Texas A & M
  • Alex Hartemink, Professor of Computer Science at Duke
  • Ronald Parr, Professor of Computer Science at Duke
• Collaborators
  • Tatsunori B. Hashimoto, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford
  • Panupong (Ice) Pasupat, Research Scientist at Google
  • Dan Iter, currently CS PhD student at Stanford
  • Evan Z. Liu, undergraduate and master’s student in Computer Science at Stanford, currently CS PhD student at Stanford
  • Dorottya Demszky, undergraduate in linguistics at Princeton, currently Linguistics PhD student at Stanford
  • Justin Fu, MS in Computer Science at Stanford & EECS PhD student at UC Berkeley, currently Research Scientist at Waymo
  • John Miller, undergraduate in Computer Science at Stanford, currently EECS PhD student at UC Berkeley

Other interests

Finally, I think the following entities are pretty swell:

• Doug Engelbart. We still need to finish this guy’s mission.
• Wikipedia and Freebase.
• Jon Kabat-Zinn. For bringing scientific attention to the study of mindfulness.
• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I think they make a huge impact by bringing an investor’s mindset to important and good causes.

Contact

• Email: kelvin 🐌 kelvinguu.com
• Twitter: @kelvin_guu
• Github: @kelvinguu
• Google Scholar: Kelvin Guu
• LinkedIn: kelvinguu