Cut your Indian friends and colleagues some slack today. 😭

At #CVPR2025 today at a workshop by folks from Mila Quebec titled VLMs 4All sites.google.com/view/vlms4all I’ll be posting here from the workshop today Already I’m so taken by the very open and welcoming space the organisers have created

Next week in Bremen

We hosted a convo with @mayameme.bsky.social @cfi-cambridge.bsky.social to celebrate her new book on ethics, driverless cars, and AI futures. She spoke about agency, design and how we think about new tech, and moral decision-making. Overview of the convo ➡️ www.mctd.ac.uk/auto-correct...

No matter if you can’t come to my book launch event on Thursday in Cambridge; @dmuravyov.bsky.social interviewed me for the Network Cultures blog and we had a really great chat. Great working with you again Dmitry 🙏🏾✨☺️

This is going to be an amazing book!

@bitnik.bsky.social will support projects against Tech Facism. “The proposed artistic projects can be tactical, performative or metaphoric, among others. We are looking for daily acts of resistance, interventions, how-tos” Full call: error417.expectation.fail/406/tech-fas...

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging." Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council. I wrote about my decision in TIME. time.com/7285045/resi...

🥹😘🫶

Pls come to my book launch on May 22, 5pm, at Newnham College Cambridge cohosted w @mctd.bsky.social and @cfi-cambridge.bsky.social and with stellar discussants @gsvoss.bsky.social and Jennifer Schooling Register here: lu.ma/9vm405sk

What can driverless cars tell us about power, ethics, and the dreams we attach to tech? Join us and @cfi-cambridge.bsky.social at @newnhamcollege.bsky.social on 22 May for a convo with @mayameme.bsky.social on her new book exploring this question. Register (free!) ➡️ www.mctd.ac.uk/events/book-...

Sometimes you see someone on the bus wearing something silly and you know they were lured and scammed by an Instagram ad.

"We should not take AI companies’ word for it when they tell us where we are headed. It is up to society and its institutions to steer innovation away from risks and toward benefits." A great piece with no mention of stakeholders and a shoutout to @mayameme.bsky.social new book Auto-Correct.

Within AI innovation, there's a strong technical idea of AI 'safety' that would love to be able to contain risk and ethical concerns. (@mayameme.bsky.social's excellent new book discusses the fantasy of ethics-by-design)

But risk, and the governance of risks, is always sociotechnical, as @alondra.bsky.social and @sethlazar.org argue here www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nature have picked up our survey. We think it's the largest survey of AI researchers ever conducted. Here's a quick thread on some of the headlines @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

DEI in corporate India survives www.thehindu.com/society/dei-... “Indian businesses are in such critical need of talent that they must necessarily act to expand their talent pools — something borne out by an uncoordinated but widespread focus on DEI”

The UK AISI is doing something very interesting with their societal resilience grants program by (re)framing AI safety as a societal issue and by supporting research from a number of sectors that have a deep understanding of safety. I’m thrilled to be a new grantee www.aisi.gov.uk/work/strengt...

I just got copies of my first book 🥹

I’m sad to hear about the passing of Jonathan Sterne. I was on a panel with him once during the pandemic and felt I had achieved something important by virtue of digital proximity 😅 To those who didn’t know his work, this post from Duke will lead you to discover this stellar media theorist.

They assure me it’s real and happening somewhere in a press in the Netherlands. Thank you to so many of you who pre-ordered. It’s coming! artezpress.artez.nl/books/auto-c...

Delighted and honored to be with @thaophan.bsky.social in meatspace and @zentralwerkstatt.org virtually next week at Goldsmiths to share something quite different for the first time

Perfecting the right kind of grovelling tone for a FAcCT rebuttal is quite a task when you’re simultaneously trying to write a grant proposal about how awesome and urgent your future work will be

Yay our paper got accepted so maybe I’ll be @4sweb.bsky.social in Seattle this year -bc I already have US visa. Thanks for nothing, Europe: Sad to have missed 4S /Easst last year. *There are still no Schengen appointments available*

VFS sucks Trying to apply for a Schengen for May-June and there are no appointments ..

So great to see this come out. At @digitalwitnesslab.org we were shocked by how easy it was to illegally purchase firearms on WhatsApp, the platform isn't even doing the bare minimum it could to prevent this. Heres the story from @restofworld.org bsky.app/profile/rest...

Harry Law’s latest newsletter argues that ‘Ai slop must flow’ as necessarily part of how technolgoies get from bad to better learningfromexamples.com/p/the-slop-mus… I know Harry thru work. I read his newsletter fairly consistently and tagged him in the original post. cc @zentralwerkstatt.org

Why are 18 in every 100 Germans voting for the AfD? Has there been a study ?

This on @lawhsw newsletter arrived and instantly bothered me: learningfromexamples.com/p/the-slop-mus… I write a long thread on X about why.Hope it comes out with the right tone!

Guardian Media Group announces strategic partnership with OpenAI www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-of...

If journalists on here are on the story about the UK’s failing phase out of the BRP pls let me tell you what it’s like to get on a plane from Europe (or anywhere) to the UK. They want you to carry printouts of SHARE CODES 🤯which mean nothing to gate staff and airlines.

Many of us scientists in the Global South have been sciencing forever with limited resources, higher costs for infrastructure and reagents/consumables, high bureaucratic burden, no overheads, and still contributed to the generation of knowledge. We’ve developed adaptive strategies.

A new report just released by the CFI explores the growing role of AI companions in healthcare and mental wellbeing. Co-authored by Dr Tomasz Hollanek and Dr Aisha Sobey the report outlines opportunities, risks and policy implications.

“Using several methods and lines of evidence, this study confirms that climate change made the catastrophic LA wildfires more likely,” Theo Keeping, wildfire researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires at Imperial College London said, according to a press release. #LAFires #ClimateChange

Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the US. The decision has big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rightsholders.

Amazing that @aljazeeraenglish.bsky.social has a lovely little documentary about Sylvia Wynter. I wish it had gotten into the concepts a bit more, but still v charming. I’m impressed a news site would commission this 🫶✨ aje.io/vkxgyf

Andreesen likened DeepSeek to a ‘Sputnik moment’ Is it an appropriate analogy? My colleagues and I @cfi-cambridge.bsky.social unpacked it as part of our global politics of AI research area www.lcfi.ac.uk/news-events/...

@whitechapelgallery.bsky.social will host myself Ramon Amaro and @cfi-cambridge.bsky.social colleague, Kerry McInerney, at a panel talk on Feb 20th, Doublethinking AI, to accompany a show by Douglas Rodney’s including AutoIcon: www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/doubl... Rodney show opens Feb 11

Delighted that @thaophan.bsky.social will be speaking online at @cfi-cambridge.bsky.social Centre for Drones & Culture on Tuesday 21/ 9am BST about this fantastic project about Australia as a site for the testing of drone delivery trials. V compelling work. Details below.

On measured enthusiasm and emphasizing the work of scientific work in thinking about how AI technologies might support research and discovery (with some quotes from me)

The Vulture story about Neil Gaiman is heartbreaking. For his victims, and for all of us who adore his work. It’s so wild

“It is thanks to their innumerable contributions that the performatively aware yet historically shallow canon of ketamine realism was even written and published. Editors are not salivating for salacious accounts of Düsseldorf.” On the death of Berlin, thebaffler.com/salvos/break...

Over the holidays I migrated my personal blog/newsletter Menopassé off Substack and to Ghost. Here’s the latest post that assembles some menopause-related advertisements I’ve been getting on IG. The menopasse.ghost.io/holy-grail-m...

NEW EPISODE! We talk to the artist/coder/critical AI scholar Sarah Ciston about their badass chatbot Ladymouth, which responds to trolls and incels on hate forums. Watch/listen now on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts! youtu.be/-EnzPpjmeGk?...

Concept maps are one of my fav things in the world; it is very interesting to see the growth and shape of this (these) field(s)

The perfect foil to Demi Moore is Kathy Bates showing up in sneakers. Where were you in the 1990s, Demi; aside from on the cover of VF naked and pregnant. You’re just in time for GenZ but too late for GenX. We are not getting any awards for our healing journeys 😑

Reminder ! You have a month or so so apply for two great permanent jobs at @cfi-cambridge.bsky.social - In design /HCI and Ai, and in the social science of Ai. Pls come be my colleague !

Touring the three living temples - Airavatesvara, Brihadisvara, Gangaikondacholapuram- built by Chola kings at the height of their powerful empire circa 1003-1100 CE. Breathtaking. Many learnings about Tamil history and culture, devotion, religiosity, and the temple industrial complex in TN

I am really excited for this new anthology from Blaft Publications, India’s best (only?) SF publisher: The Book of Anticaste SF: www.blaft.com/collections/... Launches in Delhi, Bangalore, and London (!)