Kai Nylund

(he/him)

PhD Student

  • MS in Computer Science, University of Washington 
  • BS in Computer Science, University of Washington 
  • BA in Comparative History of Ideas, University of Washington 

Kai Nylund is a PhD student in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. He is advised by Lace Padilla. 

Nylund’s research explores the intersection of machine learning, visualization, and accessibility. His work has appeared in Nature, EuroVis, and ACL. 

Before joining Khoury College in 2025, Nylund was a member of the ARK NLP group, an informal collection of natural language processing researchers led by University of Washington professor Noah Smith. There, he studied how to update language models to new time periods without additional training. Nylund also spent a year as an independent researcher, working on a package to add figure descriptions to Matplotlib figures and evaluating how large language models can fail to generate effective captions for data visualizations. 

Outside of his studies, Nylund enjoys rock climbing, making art, and tending to his houseplants.