# Graham Neubig
Associate professor at the **Language Technologies Institute** (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and co-founder + Chief Scientist of [[OpenHands]] (All Hands AI). Based in Pittsburgh, PA. Self-described on X as: *"Associate professor @LTIatCMU. Co-founder/chief scientist @OpenHandsDev. I mostly work on modeling language."*
The bridge figure between modern NLP academic research and the open-source agent stack — his CMU lab produces papers that feed directly into OpenHands' design.
## Research focus
- Natural language processing — machine translation, text generation, neural language modeling
- Code generation and software-engineering agents
- Program-aided reasoning and tool-use
- Benchmarking and evaluation of LLMs on realistic tasks
## Notable papers (by citation)
- **"Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in NLP"** (2021) — ~8,475 citations; the canonical survey of the prompting era
- **"WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents"** (2023, ICLR 2024) — ~1,565 citations; the benchmark [[Webwright]] competes on
- **"PAL: Program-aided Language Models"** (2022, ICML 2023) — ~1,704 citations; foundational for tool-augmented reasoning
- **"How can we know what language models know?"** (2020, TACL) — ~1,962 citations
- **"Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?"** (2019, NeurIPS) — ~1,742 citations; early attention-head pruning work
## Lab
**NeuLab** at CMU LTI. Mix of PhD students and visiting researchers; output spans MT, code, agents, and evaluation.
## OpenHands connection
Co-founder + Chief Scientist; sets the research direction for the open-source agent platform. The CMU pipeline of agent-related research (WebArena, code generation, benchmarks) flows naturally into OpenHands as the productionized substrate.
## Why he's interesting
- One of the few academics with serious open-source agent infrastructure shipping under his name
- The WebArena → OpenHands progression is a clean case study in research-to-product
- Strong public stance on openness (manifesto, MIT license, public benchmarks) — useful counterweight when reading closed-lab announcements
## Quotes
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## Books
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## Related
- [[OpenHands]]
- [[Webwright]]
- [[AI Agents]]
## References
- Personal site: https://www.phontron.com/
- X: https://x.com/gneubig
- GitHub: https://github.com/neubig
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wlosgkoAAAAJ
- CMU LTI: https://lti.cs.cmu.edu/