Houjun Liu
I'm Houjun, and I'm doing my BSCS and MSCS at Stanford. My friends call me Jack, and you can too if you'd like :)

If you want to say hi, I can be easily reached via the electronic mail service.

Jack does things

I’m currently making GPUs go brrr at SISL advised by Mykel Kochenderfer and StanfordNLP working with Chris Manning. I’m also a research software engineer at TalkBank lead by Brian MacWhinney. I visited Microsoft Research Frontiers as a research intern last summer.

I don’t really have a good answer of what I work on and lowkey its kind of jit compiled based on what part of NLP or RL I happen to be thinking about. (Some) current threads include…

  • Thoughtbubbles: where we make some architecture shenanigans to induce adaptive computation from an LLM from just unsupervised pretraining data
  • ASTRA: where Schmidt Science foundation graciously handed some funding to us to make LMs safer, and we built a package out of it using a method I developed called ASTPrompter
  • Stanza: occasionally I larp as someone that still work on classical computational linguistics and bake a model for coreferences or constituencies
  • Batchalign: I maintain an speech-recognition swiss army knife package that a bunch of clinicians around the world use for speech sample analysis

Previously I made a task management app with some friends, and worked at a computer vision startup called Dragonfruit AI. I still daydream about being an indie developer of productivity apps and so am currently making another one.

Jack takes a lot of notes

I have a crappy memory but I like to learn a lot so I spent an inordinate amount of time writing notes, some of which you can find here ☞

You can also use the search bar on the upper right to find some more.

Friends?

Contrary to popular belief I spend a bunch of time outside and have actual, human friends. You should meet them, they are very cool.

  • Sanity (David, Hux, Alb, and Zach) is a tight-knit friend group formed over COVID from high school. Also from high school is Dylan and Riley who are both pretty cool.
  • I feel very lucky to have met many legendary friends during my time at Stanford, including Joseph, Mason, Danny, John, Tianle, Phil, and Max…. and some more, but they don’t let me list them here :/
  • I’m privileged to have enjoyed a long and productive friendship with two close collaborators, Amelia and Róbert, and similarly I’m very grateful to friends and colleges at SISL and Stanford NLP

Picture?

If you want photographic evidence of my face, here you go. I also spend a decent amount of time these days frolicking in the outdoors, which tends to generate pictoors which you can view here.


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