CW: suicide. Honoured to be Guest Editing—with @saurabhkhanna.bsky.social—a Special Issue at ACM-TSC in tribute of my intellectual hero, Aaron Swartz, who died by suicide in 2013 at 26 after extreme prosecutorial overreach. While attempting to expand access to knowledge. CfP: tinyurl.com/4znbk4y2.

Two weeks left until our Call for Papers closes for the 7th International Conference on Social Computing (ICSC'26). Please do submit your papers! Optional conference proceedings, great keynote speakers, nice conference dinner @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social, and more. Details: icsc-conf.github.io!

Today's pushes bring in some speed efficiencies to our new model uncertainty library which make it approximately **14** times faster! Check it out now at robustipy.github.io; accompanying paper getting published very soon, super jazzed 🎷

Delighted to be helping chair ICSC '26 🤖. Hosted: @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social 🏰 When: Sept ’26 🕰️ Details: CfP live 🎉 Optional proceedings, all welcome. More: icsc-conf.github.io. Please consider sharing your work📜! Kindly help us spread the word, and follow @i-c-s-c.bsky.social for updates📣!

The quote of the year came late, but it’s good: “This is LLM generated nonsense. You make a mockery of real research. Do not submit this again.” If the originator of the quote sees this, you will remain entirely anonymous I assure you, but I want you to know that I appreciate you. Happy holidays!

📖👨‍💻🎓 New Courses Alert 🎓👨‍💻📖 The Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science is launching three upcoming short courses designed for researchers across health, economics, and the social sciences. Led by experts in the field — including @crahal.com — these courses are now open for registration.👇

A pleasure to host @philipncohen.com this week for a fantastic talk on pronatalism & many more engaging discussions about open science, public engagment, and more! #demography @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social @drjenndowd.bsky.social @melindacmills.bsky.social @crahal.com @ridhikashyap.bsky.social

We're holding brief/extremely informal 15 minute meetings with anyone who is interested in either of these positions, scheduled for 19.11.2025 and 17.11.2025, respectively. Email or DM for more information! Please do share details within your network; I think these projects are pretty cool!

Thrilled to serve as TPC co-chair (/w @chenyang03.bsky.social) for the brilliant International Conference on Social Computing! 🚀 See @i-c-s-c.bsky.social for updates! 📅 Papers: October 20th! 🔗 Full details: icsc-conf.github.io/2025/ Let’s push the frontiers of #CSS, #DataScience, #LLM, and #AI💡✨

🎉Our metrics-and-models.github.io lab announces first hybrid seminar in conjunction with @oxforddemsci.bsky.social🚨 "Nonparametric Causal Decomposition of Group Differences: New Mechanisms & New Methods" Speaker: Felix Elwert When: October 8th, 2025 Where: @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social

A paper of ours just got rejected from a leading computer science journal for being ‘too technical’ and for some disturbing reason the inner economist in me is really proud.

The utility of this data resource cannot be understated. Infinite respect to all of the incredibly talented people who worked on it! 😍

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Thanks for asking! Its almost like we made a way to automatically track this on a daily basis, @pietrobiroli.bsky.social 🤩! Kindly see gwasdiversitymonitor.com. See also: Mills, M. C., & Rahal, C. (2020). The GWAS Diversity Monitor tracks diversity by disease in real time. Nature genetics, 52(3).

🚨It's that exciting time of year!🚨 Our team has got TWO open DPhil (PhD) positions in #datascience + #health here at @oxforddemsci.bsky.social for 2026🎉! See for details: 1️⃣ 👉 crahal.com/HDS_2026.html 2️⃣ 👉 crahal.com/pophealth_2026.html Please share and help us to find our future teammates ❤️!

💡🤖🔥 @keyonv.bsky.social's talk at metrics-and-models.github.io was brilliant, posing epistemic questions about what Artificial Intelligence "understands". Next (two weeks): Alexander Vezhnevets talks about a new multi-actor generative agent based model. As usual, *all welcome* #datascience #css💡🤖🔥

Excited to contribute to this; very exciting stuff by @hggaddy.bsky.social, as usual!

💡🤖🔥The talk by Juan Carlos Perdomo at metrics-and-models.github.io was so thought provoking that the convenors stayed to discuss it in the room afterwards for quite some time! Next, we have @keyonv.bsky.social asking: "What are AI's World Models?". Exciting times over here, all welcome!💡🤖🔥

💡🤖🔥The talk by @klint.bsky.social at metrics-and-models.github.io was truly brilliant. Important work; a clean/intuitive computational design & empirical application from the @itemrespwarehouse.bsky.social! *Next:* Juan Carlos Perdomo on "The relative value of prediction" (v. excited about this)💡🤖🔥

@ramina-sotoudeh.bsky.social gave an AMAZING talk yesterday as part of the #metrics-and-models seminar series👏. Next (30.07), we have @klint.bsky.social on "Reproducing Expert Judgement with Shortened Surveys using Simulated Annealing"🔥! See website for more; metrics-and-models.github.io!

The first #metrics-and-models talk was fantastic🤗! Next: @ramina-sotoudeh.bsky.social on "Antenatal Selection: A novel approach for assessing the genetic and ecological drivers of who survives to birth". Details: metrics-and-models.github.io Sign up: [email protected]

Hurrying to post about RobustiPy, i forgot this fun animation i made for teaching purposes (with @deevybee.bsky.social on the SABS R3 CDT) around when we started developing. Specification uncertainty is just _one_ type of uncertainty, though; our forthcoming work looks at the role of random numbers!

🚀 RobustiPy is out of beta! Feature rich, we hope it becomes useful for model uncertainty / #datascience. We include 🔟 replications, including “unexplained discrepancies” in prior work! 📄 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19958 💻 GitHub: github.com/RobustiPy/robustipy 🌐 Homepage: robustipy.github.io

🔥Coming July 2: 'Metrics and Models'!🔥 A new seminar series on advanced modelling w/ impact across health/society. 🌍 Open to *ALL*! 🕑 Weds 2pm UK alternating weeks (online) 🔗 metrics-and-models.github.io 📬 [email protected] Brilliant speakers. *Please share*!

“it’s quite heavy on the statistical analysis” is probably one of the nicest inadvertent compliments a politician could ever give to a data scientist. Thank you kindly, @wendychambld.bsky.social!

One of the world's great books now accompanied by one of the world's great programming languages ♥️. Can't wait to read this.

Just moved to @zed.dev as my go-to text editor. Blazing fast with minimum latency (of any sort), so extremely feature rich, immensely beautiful, and clearly an IDE made by people who know what developers want and need. I absolutely love it; highly recommended!

Best guides people know for updating pre registration on the basis of pilot or first wave experiments?

1/5 📄✨ITS FINALLY HERE!📄✨. After _five_ years, our new model evaluation metric — The InterModel Vigorish (IMV) — is now published (@plosone.org). Paper: bit.ly/3RlqrQH Preprint: bit.ly/41LzGjm Code: github.com/intermodelvigorish ‘What’s the vig on this action?’ (bit.ly/4hPoZ3Z). ⬇️⬇️⬇️

🎉🚀🔬Our new model uncertainty library -- RobustiPy -- now also has joint inference tests (as per @urisohn.bsky.social et al., 2019, NHB). Near to release/preprint! GitHub: github.com/RobustiPy/robustipy project website: robustipy.github.io/ /w @dvaldenegro.bsky.social & @jiani-y.bsky.social!🎉🚀🔬

📖🎲RROx is hosting a fabulous Open Scholarship version of the 'Would I Lie to You' gameshow as part of the Oxford Forum of Open Scholarship.📖🎲 Some great #openscience stories to tell! Weston LIbrary (Oxford) at 15:30 on 12.03.2025, still some spaces left 🙃. Signup: shorturl.at/5EB2S

📢🎉🤖 Published today in natcomputsci.bsky.social /w @jiani-y.bsky.social📢🎉🤖: A new framework for (ir)reducible errors. We argue that it's impossible to know how 'predictable' things are (until we've collected every epsilon of information). ReadCube: rdcu.be/eb9IL arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2411.19223

In an age when so much modern scientific conversation surrounds 'Artificial General Intelligence', lets not forget that René Descartes -- in De homine (1662) -- claimed that non-human animals could be explained reductively as automata.

📝Registration for events at the Oxford Forum of Open Scholarship still open to all (March 3rd-13th, 2025)!📝 Great speakers like @briannosek.bsky.social & many others👀; looking forward to chairing a @pkp.sfu.ca / @elife.bsky.social session, too! Registration/Schedule: ⬇️ openaccess.ox.ac.uk/oxfos25

Meta-science postdoc position (3yrs): Agent-based modeling of academia 📍 Munich, Germany (Remote/hybrid options may be available) 🗣️ Felix Schönbrodt @nicebread.bsky.social, director of @lmu-osc.bsky.social 📅 application: 21.01.2025, start: March-July 2025 www.psy.lmu.de/pm/aktuelles...

“you will be visited by three types of epistemic error” arxiv.org/abs/2411.19223

Great opportunity to work with @crahal.com on his frontier informatics ideas & join @oxforddemsci.bsky.social

📝🚨Disruptive Preprint Alert🚨📝! @jiani-y.bsky.social and I conceptualise aleatoric/decompose epistemic error in generalised predictive systems, claiming that you can't ever really know the limits of #ai #ml accuracy. Keen for thoughts; kindly share, we'll acknowledge! URL: arxiv.org/abs/2411.19223

Now on arXiv! We design a new two-stage Individual Synthetic Control algorithm to cleanly identify causal estimates of the “caring penalty.” High-intensity unpaid carers face ~45% personal losses; households lose ~12%. 🏠📉 Link: arxiv.org/abs/2411.10314 Blog: shorturl.at/IVQ6M

🌟🚨🔥We’re hiring a postdoc!🔥🚨🌟 Got skills or interest in: 🔹 NLP\LLMs? 🔹 Advanced Python dev? 🔹 How HPCs work? Join us @oxforddemsci.bsky.social and the @centreforcare.bsky.social to innovate! 📄 Apply: shorturl.at/c1obm ⏳ Deadline: Jan 13, 2025 Feel free to DM me w\ Qs, and kindly share widely!🙌🙌

🚨Two Exciting DPhil\PhD Opportunities to join us at @oxforddemsci.bsky.social in Fall 2025!🚨 1️⃣ ABM project with 'Big Data' & LLMs (HDS CDT):👉 shorturl.at/wcMQo 2️⃣ Scientometrics project (DPhil PopHealth):👉 shorturl.at/qwsor 🕒⏳Deadline: ~10 days! Feel free to DM me w\ any Qs. Please share widely! 🙌