Joseph E. Gonzalez

Career

Joseph E. Gonzalez, also known as Joey Gonzalez, has been on the UC Berkeley EECS faculty since 2016 and is a member of Berkeley AI Research (BAIR). As a PhD student in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon, advised by Carlos Guestrin, Gonzalez developed GraphLab and PowerGraph for large-scale graph computation, and co-founded Turi (formerly GraphLab), which Apple acquired in 2016.²⁶

As a postdoc in Berkeley's AMPLab, Gonzalez led GraphX, which became the graph library of Apache Spark. Gonzalez is a founding member of Berkeley's RISELab, the Sky Computing Lab and LMSYS, and is listed among LMSYS's advisors.²⁶⁵

Research

Gonzalez's group studies how new systems abstractions can enable new forms of machine learning. After graph computation, the group turned in 2015 to serving and tuning models, with Velox, Clipper for low-latency prediction serving, InferLine for serving model pipelines and Ray Tune for hyperparameter tuning; Simon Mo developed Ray Serve from Clipper.⁶²

From 2021 the group worked on infrastructure for large language models, including Alpa and AlpaServe, the vLLM paper on PagedAttention memory management for LLM serving, SGLang, Chatbot Arena and the Gorilla project on connecting LLMs to APIs. Since 2023 the group's research has covered AI agents, post-training and continual learning, and new neural architectures, with projects such as MemGPT and SkyRL.⁶⁴³⁷

Open-source work

Several systems from Gonzalez's group are released as open-source software. The Gorilla repository, which hosts the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard, is under the Apache-2.0 license, as is the vLLM repository. Gonzalez's biography credits former students and collaborators with leading these systems, among them Shishir Patil and Tianjun Zhang for Gorilla and Lianmin Zheng and Ying Sheng for SGLang.⁸⁹⁷²

Work and contributions

• Gorilla and the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) Open-source code

  Co-author of "Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs" (2023). Gonzalez's research page says Gorilla was led by Gonzalez's students Shishir Patil and Tianjun Zhang and that BFCL is now led by Gonzalez's student Huanzhi Mao; the Gorilla repository, which holds the BFCL code and data, is Apache-2.0 licensed.³⁶⁷⁸

• vLLM Open-source code

  Co-author of "Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention" (2023), the vLLM paper. The vllm-project/vllm repository is Apache-2.0 licensed.⁴⁶⁹

Timeline

1. 2010Published the first GraphLab paper, at UAI 2010, as part of doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon.⁶
2. 2012Published Distributed GraphLab at VLDB 2012 and PowerGraph at OSDI 2012.⁶
3. 2014Published GraphX, graph processing inside a distributed dataflow framework, at OSDI 2014.⁶
4. 2016Joined the UC Berkeley EECS faculty; Turi, which Gonzalez co-founded, was acquired by Apple the same year.²⁶
5. 2017Published Clipper, a general-purpose, low-latency prediction serving system, at NSDI 2017.⁶
6. 2023Received the VLDB 2023 Test of Time Award for Distributed GraphLab.⁶
7. May 24, 2023Co-authored the Gorilla paper on large language models connected with massive APIs.³
8. Sep 12, 2023Co-authored the vLLM paper on PagedAttention memory management for LLM serving.⁴
9. 2024Co-authored the Chatbot Arena paper at ICML 2024.⁶

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Co-founder, Turi (formerly GraphLab)²
• Postdoctoral researcher who led GraphX, UC Berkeley AMPLab²⁶

Honors and recognition

• VLDB Test of Time Award (Distributed GraphLab) · International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2023⁶²
• ACM SIGMOD Systems Award (shared, for Apache Spark) · ACM SIGMOD²
• NSF CAREER Award · National Science Foundation²

Where they work

• UC Berkeley 27 people in the wiki
• LMSYS 3 people in the wiki

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