Philippe Laban

plaban@microsoft.com
LinkedIn
X/Twitter
Google Scholar

Hi! I'm a Research Scientist at Microsoft Research, based in New York. I completed my Ph.D. in CS in 2021, advised by Marti Hearst and John Canny at UC Berkeley.

I work at the intersection of NLP (~70%) and HCI (~30%). I am passionate about studying and building the future of reading and writing interfaces as I believe that NLP technology will revolutionize how we consume (read) and create (write) information. How do we get there?

Specific tasks I'm passionate about include summarization, simplification (which you can think of as "reading tools" if you choose to), and LLM evaluation/benchmarking.

See my research garden below for a visual organization of some of my work, or my Google Scholar for a full list of publications.

Want your own Research Garden visualization?

All you need is: (1) garden.css, (2) garden.js, and (3) an HTML file. In the HTML file, there's a javascript variable var papers = [...]; that you can modify to include your own papers. If you end up using it, feel free to send me a link, so I can check it out!

Reach out!

Thanks for visiting my website! Here are some reasons to reach out to me:

You're a researcher, and you have a question about some of my work, or want to brainstorm, pitch a research project, debug an idea, etc.
You're a journalist, and want an technical opinion on a topic I have expertise in. (See some articles I've been interviewed for NYTimes, Science, Le Monde, Podcast)
You work at a startup, and want technical expertise, either informally or as a board member/consultant. I've advised a few startups with products related to news reading, summarization, and factuality.
You work on NLP/HCI in NYC, and want to grab a coffee to meet likeminded folks in the city.

This list is likely not exhaustive. When in doubt, reach out by email!