drum roll…

AIM's 2nd round of TTK hiring - building up to 30 - is up! 📅 Ddl 12/22/25 🔬 Accessibility & Learning, plus Sustainability & Social Justice 🧑‍🏫 Associate/Full Prof* 🔗 umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j... *Assistant-level candidates: apply to departments, mentioning AIM in a cover letter

AIM's 2nd round of TTK hiring - building up to 30 - is up! 📅 Ddl 12/22/25 🔬 Accessibility & Learning, plus Sustainability & Social Justice 🧑‍🏫 Associate/Full Prof* 🔗 umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UMCP/j... *Assistant-level candidates: apply to departments, mentioning AIM in a cover letter

If you're at #FACCT2025 today, check out our AI Workers' Inquiry, where we'll have a stellar panel of workers organizing against AI and host a participatory session. You can also participate online! ai-workers-inquiry.github.io

my teenagehood destroyed: pbrush now has AI support.

We are delighted to announce our next seminar by Hal Daumé III @haldaume3.bsky.social ‬(@univofmaryland.bsky.social, currently on sabbatical at @sorbonne-universite.fr) entitled "Fairness and Trustworthiness in Generative Al" on Friday 20th June at 11am CEST.

What should Machine Translation research look like in the age of multilingual LLMs? Here’s one answer from researchers across NLP/MT, Translation Studies, and HCI. "An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human-Centered Machine Translation" arxiv.org/abs/2506.13468

BREAKING: A federal judge in Massachusetts (the Reagan-appointed William Young) has declared the Trump administration's cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump's EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are "illegal" and "void." He's ordering many grants restored.

For the EALM Workshop "On Assessing the Political Biases of Multilingual Large Language Models" by @lernerp.bsky.social Laurène Cave, @haldaume3.bsky.social Léo Labat, Gaël Lejeune, Pierre-Antoine Lequeu, @bpiwowar.bsky.social Nazanin Shafiabadi and yvofr.bsky.social, collaborated with the STIH lab

slashing support for grad students and undergraduates by 75% is a disastrous policy for US science and competitiveness.

Happy to see the Maryland Attorney General participating in this effort. I’ve generally been quite happy with the state and university responses to the terminations and other actions.

We introduce a super simple yet effective strategy to improve video-language alignment (+18%): add hallucination correction in your training objective👌 Excited to share our accepted paper at ACL: Can Hallucination Correction Improve Video-language Alignment? Link: arxiv.org/abs/2502.15079

This is an incredibly well thought out and well written statement co-signed by a large group of subreddits on the importance of academic research. I hate how it had to come about, but love the statement. (And yes, this is the one that I had terminated 12 days ago.)

The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988

Hi Kate-- I'm really sorry to hear this. If NIH terminations are any guide, we expect NSF terminations to be chaotic, so we're trying to track them and organize the information. If don't mind, please have your team enter their grants here: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni... And please spread the word.

also got my first NSF grant terminated! what emoji do i put in my handle to signify this?

I am reading this correctly right? Broadening participation at NSF may target non-protected groups but cannot target protected groups? It’s almost as if the issue isn’t with broadening participation but rather with which groups have been designated as protected over the past 60 years.

I will be at IUI on 24-25 march. I'd love to meet up with folks who are interested in meeting up. DM me if that's you!

US tech firms - IME - rely heavily on grads of higher ed in general, and US higher ed in particular... And yet I've not heard much noise from the Pichais, Nadellas, Zuckerbergs, Cooks, Benioffs, Sus, Jassys, Huangs, etc. about attacks on higher education... Am I missing it or does it not exist?

There is a new version of the Research Plan for NIST's AI Safety Consortium (AISIC) in response to EOs. I did a diff. Out: safety, responsibility, sociotechnical, fairness, working w fed agencies, authenticating content, watermarking, RN of CBRN, autonomous replication, ctrl of physical systems >

With all this uncertainty in the US science funding landscape, what I really hope is that we - as panelists who review proposals - continue to review according to what we think are the strongest proposals and do not anticipatorily comply with directions that are not *specifically* required of us.

i confess i did not know this history until now

Check out my new Starter Pack of all things University of Maryland! Let me know if you are a Terp or a Terp fan and I’ll add you to the pack. #UMD #Maryland go.bsky.app/7TfyH9o

at TRAILCon today, enjoying TRAILS branded Trail Mix

NLI Improves Compositionality in Vision-Language Models is accepted to #ICLR2025! CECE enables interpretability and achieves significant improvements in hard compositional benchmarks without fine-tuning (e.g., Winoground, EqBen) and alignment (e.g., DrawBench, EditBench). + info: cece-vlm.github.io

Please join us for: AI at Work: Building and Evaluating Trust Presented by our Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRIALS) institute. Feb 3-4 Washington DC Open to all! Details and registration at: trails.gwu.edu/trailscon-2025 Sponsorship details at: trails.gwu.edu/media/556

Please join us for: AI at Work: Building and Evaluating Trust Presented by our Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRIALS) institute. Feb 3-4 Washington DC Open to all! Details and registration at: trails.gwu.edu/trailscon-2025 Sponsorship details at: trails.gwu.edu/media/556

📢 The survey 👇 on "intelligence" & ChatGPT is open until Jan 14. All fields are welcome, but a special invitation goes to folks in Philosophy, Psychology, HCI, Cognitive Science, CSS, and AI ethics. Please repost.

anyone fine tuned this multilingual yet?

Using “government efficiency” as an excuse to replace human decision-makers with poorly designed systems will only compound AI harms, rendering opaque and uncontestable verdicts that deeply impact people’s lives, write Kevin De Liban and Alice Marwick. www.techpolicy.press/ai-cant-solv...

Q: what's worse than hearing a popping sound in your finger while bouldering? A: hearing two popping sounds back to back in adjacent fingers.

for the linguists out there

Human-centered Evalulation and Auditing of Language models (HEAL) workshop is back for #CHI2025, with this year's special theme: “Mind the Context”! Come join us on this bridge between #HCI and #NLProc! Workshop submission deadline: Feb 17 AoE More info at heal-workshop.github.io.

Premier-TACO is a Few-Shot Policy Learner: Pretraining Multitask Representation via Temporal Action-Driven Contrastive Loss We show that a carefully constructed temporal contrastive loss leads to effective, multitask RL pretraining. by Ruijie Zheng +al ICML’24 hal3.name/docs/daume24... (eos)

all i want for xmas is a way to visualize text that’s not a word cloud

"somehow" is doing so much work in this quote. (ALT for image: Ilya Sutskever giving a talk about pretraining; caption: "...internet. We have, but one internet. You could even go as far as to say That data is the fossil fuel of AI. It was like, created somehow. And now we use it.")

New paper on why machine "unlearning" is much harder than it seems is now up on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2412.06966 This was a huuuuuge cross-disciplinary effort led by @msftresearch.bsky.social FATE postdoc @grumpy-frog.bsky.social!!!

please give us your stuff for nothing and we'll give you back ... our definition of "open" models.

The world needs more scientists communicating with the broader public. I'm honored to be an alum of the AAAS Mass Media Fellows Program (@aaasmassmedia.bsky.social), which is now accepting applications for the its 50th(!) cohort. Apply here: massmedia.secure-platform.com/a/page/About

HateCOT: An Explanation-Enhanced Dataset for Generalizable Offensive Speech Detection via LLMs There are lots of hate datasets with different nuances. We show how to pretrain on a COT-enhanced dataset to get great performance on data du jour. by Huy Nghiem +al EMNLP’24 hal3.name/docs/daume24... >

starter pack for the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing group at the University of Maryland - get all your NLP and data science here! go.bsky.app/V9qWjEi

Do great minds think alike? Investigating Human-AI Complementarity in QA We use item response theory to compare the capabilities of 155 people vs 70 chatbots at answering questions, teasing apart complementarities; implications for design. by Maharshi Gor +al EMNLP’24 hal3.name/docs/daume24... >

starting to feel like slack is as bad as email.

Understanding the Impacts of Language Technologies’ Performance Disparities on AAL Speakers We find AAL speakers expend significant invisible labor in order to achieve parity of outputs in LT systems; fairness measures don't capture this. by Jay Cunningham +al ACL’24 hal3.name/docs/daume24... >

Today I went to the USM Regents meeting and spoke for @uam-umd.bsky.social and in support of UMD's Graduate Labor Union, who have supermajority support and are seeking voluntary recognition. Our working conditions are learning conditions. The right is coming for us all, management must work with us.

Question that came up last night: Are there examples of technologies 1) that were fundamentally unreliable, & 2) where educators were expected to teach students to deal? 1) excludes calculators 2) excludes early web search (eg AV), at least in my memory To the point: should this be our job?

The really grim reality is that this is really not just about kids - there are countless adults, often adult *professionals*(doctors, lawyers, teachers(!)) that use ChatGPT this way. And I can understand why - there's no warning on the box! Few truly understand the tech's very real limitations.

We're hiring a Language Science postdoc as part of our inaugural Fellowship for Postdoctoral Scholars! Click the link in bio to apply #UniversityofMaryland

I'm recruiting potential emergency reviewers for the Ethics, Bias, & Fairness track at #ACL2025. Emergency reviewing will happen around March 16-28. 🌟 If you volunteer, you will be officially exempt from regular reviewing duties during this cycle! 🌟 A very short form to indicate your interest:

starter pack for the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing group at the University of Maryland - get all your NLP and data science here! go.bsky.app/V9qWjEi