Jack Hessel
contact: jmhessel@gmail.com
CV (as of Oct. 2025).
I am on github, bluesky, twitter, and google scholar.
I am a researcher at Anthropic.
Previously: I was on the founding team at Samaya AI, I was a postdoc/research scientist at AI2, and before that, I earned a PhD in Computer Science at Cornell University.
If you're looking for a bio for a talk introduction, here's one. If you're looking for me in person, I look something like this:
Selected projects:
I publish at ML/NLP conferences like NeurIPS, ACL, etc. My full list of publications (including more recent ones :-) ) is available on Google Scholar. Here are 3 representative previous works:-
Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor "Understanding" Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest
Jack Hessel, Ana Marasović, Jena D. Hwang, Lillian Lee, Jeff Da, Rowan Zellers, Robert Mankoff, Yejin Choi
ACL 2023 (Best paper award!)
-
Does my multimodal model learn cross-modal interactions? It’s harder to tell than you might think!
Jack Hessel and Lillian Lee
EMNLP 2020
-
MERLOT: Multimodal Neural Script Knowledge Models
Rowan Zellers*, Ximing Lu*, Jack Hessel*, Youngjae Yu, Jae Sung Park, Jize Cao, Ali Farhadi, and Yejin Choi.
NeurIPS 2021
Former interns
I've been undeservedly fortunate to (co-)host many PhD research interns. Following their excitement and insight has been a highlight of my working life. Former interns (whom I hope do not regret entrusting me+their co-hosts with one of their valuable PhD summer quarters!) include: Sarah Wiegreffe, Yanpeng Zhao, Liunian Harold Li, Wanrong Zhu, Amita Kamath, Jillian Fisher, Tejas Srinivasan, Anthony Sicilia, Yutaro Yamada, Orion Weller, Skyler Hallinan, and Howard Yen.More?
I earned a B.A. from Carleton College. I'm a bike lane/transit fan, an ice hockey player (go Sharks!), a consumer/occasional producer of electronic music, an improv attempter, an enjoyer of cooking vegetables, an amateur lockpicker, and I like mountains/hiking/climbing/camping/sitting by rivers/etc.