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Douglas Downey

Douglas Downey

· Professor of Computer Science

Northwestern University · Chemical Engineering

Active 1997–2026

h-index31
Citations8.2k
Papers178109 last 5y
Funding$1.2M1 active

Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.

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About

Douglas Downey is a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Master of Science in Robotics programs. His research focuses on natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, with particular interest in the automatic construction of useful knowledge bases from Web text. He aims to develop techniques and prototypes that extend the state of the art in Web search and to establish a formal basis for learning from unstructured text without relying on hand-labeled data. Downey also works on ways to utilize human input more effectively in machine learning, exploring methods such as active learning and semi-supervised learning to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of machine learning systems.

Research topics

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Machine Learning
  • Information Retrieval
  • Psychology
  • Mathematics
  • Engineering
  • Human–computer interaction

Selected publications

  • Perspective: Large Language Models in Applied Mechanics

    Journal of Applied Mechanics · 2023-06-21 · 26 citations

    article

    Abstract Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and PaLM, are able to perform sophisticated text comprehension and generation tasks with little or no training. Alongside their broader societal impacts, these capabilities carry great promise for the physical sciences, including applied mechanics. We present a summary of recent developments in these models, their application to mechanics and adjacent fields, and a perspective on their future use in applied mechanics, taking into account the…

    PublisherDOI

  • SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty

    2024-01-01 · 24 citations

    articleOpen access
    PublisherOA PDFDOI

  • A Computational Inflection for Scientific Discovery

    Communications of the ACM · 2023-07-25 · 23 citations

    articleOpen access

    Enabling researchers to leverage systems to overcome the limits of human cognitive capacity.

    PublisherDOI

  • The Semantic Reader Project

    Communications of the ACM · 2024-09-19 · 10 citations

    articleOpen access

    Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the greater the need for new technology to support scholars. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which has been transformed by Internet technology, the experience of reading research papers has changed little in decades. For instance, the PDF format for sharing papers remains widely used due to its por…

    PublisherDOI

  • MARG: Multi-Agent Review Generation for Scientific Papers

    ArXiv.org · 2024-01-08 · 8 citations

    preprintOpen accessSenior author

    We study the ability of LLMs to generate feedback for scientific papers and develop MARG, a feedback generation approach using multiple LLM instances that engage in internal discussion. By distributing paper text across agents, MARG can consume the full text of papers beyond the input length limitations of the base LLM, and by specializing agents and incorporating sub-tasks tailored to different comment types (experiments, clarity, impact) it improves the helpfulness and specificity of feedback.…

    PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

Frequent coauthors

  • Daniel S. Weld

    Allen Institute

    89 shared

  • Kyle Lo

    64 shared

  • Zejiang Shen

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    50 shared

  • Bailey Kuehl

    41 shared

  • Erin Bransom

    34 shared

  • Luca Soldaini

    33 shared

  • Amanpreet Singh

    32 shared

  • Chandra Bhagavatula

    Allen Institute

    30 shared

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