I spoke this week about online misinformation and why protecting our cognition matters. Crises narrow our thinking, repetition amplifies narrow frames, and absence shapes our perspective. These dynamics make societies vulnerable. Real resilience begins with protecting cognition under stress.

Darwin's regrets: "If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect and more probably to the moral character"

I used to write “the authors”, and now I keep talking about “the paper”. Recently, it feels like adding “ChatGPT hallucinated here, and here”.

The Nobel Prize committee should announce the World Cup winner tomorrow

Grant rejected.

📣 Call for Workshop & Tutorial Proposals 📣 #IUI2026 is looking forward to your contribution! Bring your ideas and discuss them with fellow researchers in Paphos, Cyprus, from March 22-26, 2026. 🚨 Proposal Deadlines: Aug 22 (Workshops) and Oct 17 (Tutorials)🚨 iui.hosting.acm.org/2026/call-fo...

Papers might as well declare "Data available upon victory in a duel."

🤖📢 AI chatbots often make science sound more certain than it is. A new study found large language models like ChatGPT-4o overgeneralise scientific research - sometimes 73% more than the original papers. Even when asked to be accurate. 🔗 doi.org/10.1098/rsos... #SciComm #AI 🧪

"o3, show me a photo of the most stereotypical X and LinkedIn feeds as seen on a mobile device. Really lean into it."

Had great conversations with Jeremie Fish in his podcast: Profiles in American Funded Research open.spotify.com/episode/2hxm... youtu.be/vzU3mXkBcAg

My artwork got featured in this very nice article by Katie Liu www.binghamton.edu/news/story/5...

"I am happy to take any questions"

🤩 We're at exactly 2^8 #CHI2025 preprints now! So have a byte of CHI here: 🍱🍜 medium.com/human-center...

Since both believed to some extent in inheritance of acquired traits, the fundamental difference between Lamarck and Darwin (aside from mechanism, natural selection vs use and disuse) is that Lamarck believed in the power of Life and Darwin believed in the power of Death

🚀 Ever noticed something just feels off? 🤔 Inspired by the understanding that our brains are wired to focus on surprises, we developed Learning via Surprisability (LvS)—a novel transformation approach for timelines that excels at detecting anomalies: 🔗 arxiv.org/pdf/2503.04502

Not everybody knows that Cyndi Lauper wrote "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" about scientists #theconferencetoendallconferences

We are planning an exciting and interactive workshop with fantastic keynote speakers. Join us at Cagliari, Italy, on March 24th!

Check out the updated speaker list of #NERCCS2025! nerccs2025.github.io Abstract submission deadline: February 28, 2025 Limited amount of travel support is also available. Come to Binghamton!

You: But I don't know what to do with a super-smart AI capable of conducting graduate-level research. Me:

There, there. Don't you fret. Just seven more years and it'll all be over.

Here’s a paper we did about this pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Science is like a candle in the dark. Anyone seeking to extinguish it threatens to take us back the dark ages.

This is putting people’s lives at risk. More than at risk. Write to your representatives. Show up at protests. Donate your time or your money. This is not the time to sit on the sidelines.

We just extended the submission deadline for the HAI-GEN workshop at #IUI2025. Please submit your work by Fri Jan 24, AoE! hai-gen.github.io/2025/ @ossimokryn.bsky.social, @wernergeyer.bsky.social

How to make a presentation? Don't save the best for last! Right from the start, describe your main question and a summary of your big idea. Everyone is listening at those first few minutes but they'll only continue to listen if you grab their attention.

we’re gonna get executed behind an abandoned Party City by complete fucking dorks

As a reward for finishing first in qualifying at a ski jumping World Cup event, organizers presented the male winner with 3,000 Swiss francs ($3,290), and the female winner with towels and shampoo.

First day of #netscix2025. You can follow this link to watch it live. Excited to present my keynote in just a couple of hours! www.youtube.com/live/frY8luh....

The purring you didn’t know you needed for your weekend

Edith Heard: "I looked on the microscope and it was incredible, I had never imagined that there would be an enrichment.. And so in a way you need both you need the hypotheses [..] But then you need to have the open mind to pick up the unexpected observations and follow them up."

George Church (@geochurch.bsky.social) on embracing the outlier: "There'd be one point this way the heck off of a scatterplot... you could come up with a filter.. or you could drill down on that point and figure out what's different.. it could tell you there's something novel here"

I enjoyed talking with @heyira.bsky.social on @scifri.bsky.social about "AGI" (and its different meanings). Listen here: www.sciencefriday.com/segments/wha...

E. g. computation can come in both in forming a system’s “prior” on its environment, and in using observed data to compute more data before carrying out inferential belief updating. And Jaynes’ approach to the latter can be formalized in terms of a system’s resistance to updating beliefs. 11/

This post & its part I predecessor form an interesting duo. Part I relies on fundamentally stochastic models, and Part II on deterministic computation, and has some severe criticism on the use of stochastic methods to describe emergence. 1/

Read Dave, who helped build Facebook’s first content policies, on why this week represents such a big step backwards: “The specific examples I called out above have been prohibited on the site since I wrote the first set of hate speech standards in 2009.”

Our paper "AI ethics unwrapped: an empirical investigation of ethical principles in collaborative ideation processes" by Christina Cociancig, Hendrik Heuer and Andreas Breiter was just published in the journal AI and Ethics. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our current work is making strides towards better definitions, models, & operationalizations of what misinformation (and other related phenomena like rumors & disinformation) is & how it works. We have multiple papers in review building upon the ideas in this article: www.cip.uw.edu/2023/12/06/r...

If you're following the OpenAI o3 announcements and are curious about the "ARC-AGI" benchmark and why I think solving these tasks by brute-force compute defeats the original purpose, here are some past posts about this from my Substack: (1/3)

There’s no strong reason for non-German nationals to have been closely following the rise of the AfD (Alternativ fuer Deutschland) party in Germany, so here are some details to get you up to speed:

📣 Join our 6th "HAI-GEN" workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models at #IUI2025! 👉 Submit a paper, demo or poster by Jan 22: hai-gen.github.io/2025/ with: @ossimokryn.bsky.social, @wernergeyer.bsky.social, Orit Shaer, Justin Weisz, Lydia Chilton, Mary Lou Maher #IUI #HCI #CHI #AI

Given that we're a week out from U.S. Thanksgiving, I just wanted to reiterate that @tomcostello.bsky.social created a website that uses AI to help debunk conspiracy theories: www.debunkbot.com If you end up trying it out, please let us know how it goes! (cc @dgrand.bsky.social)

📣 Join our 6th "HAI-GEN" workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models at #IUI2025! 👉 Submit a paper, demo or poster by Jan 22: hai-gen.github.io/2025/ with: Orit Shaer, Justin Weisz, @wernergeyer.bsky.social, Lydia Chilton, @ossimokryn.bsky.social, Mary Lou Maher

Following a week of big emotions, I declare a celebration of a part of your brain that's been on overdrive but you've barely heard of: the Insula! Each day, I'll pass along a fascinating something about the Insula. In 7 days it just might be your new favorite brain region (it's mine). Day 1 ...

How to write a grant? 1. The application is for the reviewer, not you, the applicant. 2. Communicate in stories. 3. Make your story cohesive—leave no puzzling gaps. 4. Make your story resonate to keep the reviewer reading. 5. Accept chance and noise in peer-review. www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

Saying ‘I don’t know’ in talks has become a lost art, unfortunately. Super interesting discussions require us to be open about what we don’t know and what still needs to be explored. Here’s my recipe for answering questions in talks:

I don’t want to throw shade, but I would like the folks who kept telling us that there’s no evidence pervasive mis- and disinformation have negative impacts to account for the likelihood that prominent spreaders of BS will be running the agencies that protect public health, intelligence, etc.

We also present the 1st evidence that the entire scheme of Special Issues (SIs) is designed to do this. Across publishers, SI articles go faster. W/i groups, higher accept rates too. Is that good or bad? Depends on how much care is put in: 26 SIs per year or 9 SIs per day? Different beasts. 🧵 6/n

Anyone spending the brief liminal window between Christmas and Georgian new year in Hamburg, with the hackers, at CCC? I am! And I'll be presenting new research and a new talk ☺️ halfnarp.events.ccc.de