Peter West

Peter West is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Computer Science Department, specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI. His research focuses on understanding the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI systems, emphasizing their divergence from human intuition and alignment challenges.

He holds a PhD from the University of Washington (2024), supervised by Yejin Choi, and a BSc (Honours Computer Science) from UBC (2017). His work has been recognized with awards including Best Method Paper at NAACL 2022 and Outstanding Paper awards at ACL 2023 and EMNLP 2023. He conducted internships at the Allen Institute for AI and Microsoft Research’s NLP group.

Research interests include analyzing LLM behavior through a natural sciences lens, exploring model capabilities versus human expectations, and developing decoding algorithms to infuse models with algorithmic logic. His recent publications address generative AI paradoxes, constrained text generation, and symbolic knowledge distillation.

He serves on panels for NeurIPS workshops and is beginning a postdoc at Stanford with Chris Potts. His research group at UBC seeks students interested in generative AI’s analytical frontiers.