معرفی
Douglas Downey is a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Department of Computer Science. He is currently on leave to direct the Semantic Scholar research group at the Allen Institute for AI, focusing on NLP and HCI tools for scientific literature discovery.
Education:
- Ph.D. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- M.S. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- B.S./M.S. Computer Science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
Research Interests: His work centers on natural language processing and machine learning, specifically the automatic construction of knowledge bases from web text to advance web search capabilities. He develops methods to optimize human input in ML systems via active learning (strategic data selection) and semi-supervised learning (leveraging unlabeled data).
Publication Trends: Recent work (2022-2024) emphasizes NLP efficiency, explainable AI, and scientific literature tools. Themes include model optimization (embedding recycling), ethical AI (bias mitigation), and human-AI collaboration (interactive systems like LIMEADE and CiteSee). Publications frequently appear in premier venues like ACL and ACM.
Advising: Actively mentors PhD students at Northwestern. Current advisees include Chris Coleman and Mike D'Arcy. Alumni hold positions at Google, Meta, HKUST, and other institutions.
Labs/Teams: Leads the Semantic Scholar research team at Allen Institute for AI, building tools to help scholars discover and synthesize scientific literature. Collaborates with Northwestern faculty David Demeter and Larry Birnbaum.
