PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Robert West

Also known as Bob West

Robert West is a computer scientist at EPFL whose research connects artificial intelligence, natural language processing and computational social science, with a focus on building AI that is safe for humanity. After earning an undergraduate degree at Technische Universität München in 2007 and an MSc at McGill University in 2010, he completed a Stanford PhD in 2016 under Jure Leskovec, with a dissertation on how people navigate Wikipedia. He joined EPFL as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2016, received the ICWSM Adamic–Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award in 2022, and coauthored the ACL 2024 Outstanding Paper "Do Llamas Work in English?", which asks whether multilingual language models use English as an internal pivot language. A sabbatical in 2024 and 2025 took him to Microsoft Research Redmond as a visiting researcher working on agentic AI. As of October 2026, he is an associate professor at EPFL, heads its Data Science & AI Lab (dlab), and is an ELLIS Scholar.

Now at
EPFL

Timeline

  1. 2007–2010

    Degrees from TUM and McGill

    He earns his undergraduate degree at Technische Universität München in 2007 and an MSc at McGill University in 2010.

  2. 2016

    Stanford PhD on web navigation

    He completes a PhD in computer science at Stanford University in 2016, advised by Jure Leskovec. His dissertation, Human navigation of information networks, studies tens of thousands of navigation traces from the Wikispeedia game, where players click between two Wikipedia articles, and builds tools for recommending missing hyperlinks.

  3. 2016

    Assistant professor at EPFL

    In 2016, the Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology names him Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Communication Systems in EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences. His main interest is understanding and predicting human behaviour in digital networks, using data science, network analysis, machine learning and linguistics.

  4. 2022

    ICWSM young researcher award

    He receives the ICWSM Adamic–Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award in 2022.

  5. May 2024

    Inaugural lecture at EPFL

    In May 2024, he gives his EPFL inaugural lecture on Human Data Science, as associate professor of computer science and head of the Data Science Lab (dlab). He describes how his lab blends artificial intelligence, natural language processing and computational social science to learn from the data people generate on digital platforms.

  6. 2024

    An ACL outstanding paper

    In 2024, he coauthors "Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers" with Chris Wendler, Veniamin Veselovsky and Giovanni Monea. The paper asks whether multilingual language models use English as an internal pivot language, and ACL 2024 names it an Outstanding Paper.

  7. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at EPFL

    In 2024 and 2025, he spends a sabbatical as a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research Redmond, where he works on agentic AI with the AI Frontiers team. He is an associate professor of computer science at EPFL, heads its Data Science & AI Lab (dlab), which works on building AI that is safe for humanity, and is an ELLIS Scholar.

Career

  1. Since 2016EPFLTenure Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Communication Systems, Associate Professor of Computer Science
  2. 2024–2025Microsoft ResearchVisiting Researcher

Education

  1. 2016Stanford UniversityPhD
  2. 2010McGill UniversityMSc
  3. 2007Technical University of MunichUndergraduate degree

From the biography.

  1. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes EPFL. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes EPFL. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes EPFL. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  4. Universities had a net outflow of 2,068 moves in AI careersIncludes EPFL. Our estimates of career flows and median h-index across universities and companies in AI, including the role of joint appointments and earlier academic jobs.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Robert West yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. EPFL - Robert West people.epfl.ch. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Human navigation of information networks | Stanford Digital Repository purl.stanford.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Robert West appointed as Tenure Track Assistant Professor - EPFL actu.epfl.ch. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Inaugural Lecture – Prof. Robert West - EPFL memento.epfl.ch. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Best Paper Awards - ACL 2024 2024.aclweb.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.