PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Andrew Head

Andrew Head is a computer scientist whose work connects human-computer interaction with AI systems for scholarly reading and vision-language models. He completes a Berkeley EECS PhD in 2020, holds postdoctoral roles at Berkeley and the Allen Institute for AI, and joins the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor in 2022. In 2024, he coauthors The Semantic Reader Project and the Molmo and PixMo report on open vision-language models. The Molmo and PixMo paper earns a CVPR 2025 Best Paper Honorable Mention, and he receives an NSF CAREER award in March 2026 for interactive tools that explain scientific notation and formal proof. As of October 2026, he is a Penn assistant professor, co-leads Penn HCI, and his lab has five papers at UIST.

Works
66
Citations
1,579
h-index
22

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2020

    Interactive Program Distillation

    At UC Berkeley, he completes an EECS PhD in 2020 through the dissertation Interactive Program Distillation, which defines program distillation as simplifying existing programs to emphasize their key ideas.

  2. June 2020–December 2021

    Postdoctoral work at Berkeley and Ai2

    At UC Berkeley, he serves as a postdoctoral scholar under Marti A. Hearst from June 2020 through June 2021. He joins the Allen Institute for AI’s Semantic Scholar research team as a postdoctoral scholar under Daniel S. Weld from July 2021 through December 2021.

  3. January 2022

    Assistant professor at Penn

    In January 2022, he starts as an assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science.

  4. 2024

    Semantic Reader and Molmo

    In 2024, he coauthors The Semantic Reader Project, on AI-powered interactive reading interfaces for scholarly documents, and the Molmo and PixMo report, which introduces open vision-language models.

  5. 2025

    A Best Paper Honorable Mention

    The Molmo and PixMo paper earns a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CVPR in 2025, with Andrew Head among its authors.

  6. March 2026

    An NSF CAREER award

    In March 2026, he receives an NSF CAREER award for a project on making scientific notation and formal proof understandable through interaction.

  7. October 2026

    Five papers at UIST

    In October 2026, his lab reports five UIST papers for 2026, covering science-AI attribution, interactive proof and notation, and debugging tools.

  8. As of October 2026

    Assistant professor at Penn

    As of October 2026, he is an assistant professor in Penn’s Department of Computer and Information Science and co-leads Penn HCI alongside Danaé Metaxa.

Career

  1. Since 2022University of PennsylvaniaAssistant Professor
  2. 2021Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Postdoctoral Scholar
  3. 2020–2021University of California, BerkeleyPostdoctoral Scholar

Education

  1. 2020University of California, BerkeleyPhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Gamut2019 · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 225 citations
  2. Managing Messes in Computational Notebooks2019 · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 161 citations
  3. Writing Reusable Code Feedback at Scale with Mixed-Initiative Program Synthesis2017 · ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S) · 117 citations
  4. Can Human Development be Measured with Satellite Imagery?2017 · International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) · 90 citations
  5. Augmenting Scientific Papers with Just-in-Time, Position-Sensitive Definitions of Terms and Symbols2021 · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 89 citationsWith Daniel S. Weld and Marti Hearst

From OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Pennsylvania. Our estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.
  2. 44% of AI career moves go from one university to anotherIncludes University of Pennsylvania. We estimate how 12,774 AI career moves link universities, companies, labs and government research centers, with net flows and the most common paths.
  3. Stanford University trained or employed 27 of the 111 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of Pennsylvania. Stanford University trained or employed 27 of the 111 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and employment links for major-prize and best-paper winners.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 3% to 32%Includes University of Pennsylvania. We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 3% in 1975–1979 to 32% in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Ph.D. Dissertations | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. Interactive Program Distillation | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. Andrew Head andrewhead.info. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. Publications - PENN HCI pennhci.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. [2409.17146] Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. GitHub - allenai/molmo: Code for the Molmo Vision-Language Model github.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. CVPR 2025 Best Papers and Best Demos cvpr.thecvf.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  8. Andrew Head andrewhead.info. Checked 18 October 2026.