Perhaps the final meeting from the old @oii.ox.ac.uk buildings before the institute moves to its new haunt at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities – featuring the great Chico Kerche, @rocher.lc, Franziska Hafner and @lujain.bsky.social to talk about information and news within LLMs.

Incredible scenes as the University of Warwick refuses to answer an FOI on the cost of an advertorial photo feature on their chief marketing officer in Vogue Singapore because it is a 'trade secret' www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cost...

Facial recognition systems often boast near-perfect test scores, but real life tells a different story. OII researchers Teo Canmetin, Juliette Zaccour @biksil.bsky.social and Luc Rocher @rocher.lc expose the gap between lab evaluations and real-world conditions.

Research by @rocher.lc @lujain.bsky.social and Sofia Hafner cited in the Telegraph shows the warmer a chatbot feels, the more it may drift into conspiracy. OpenAI’s fix shows how hard it is to balance empathy & truth in AI. www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

Lab evaluations of facial recognition claiming a high level of accuracy have been used to justify the technology's vast deployment, but they often ignore how the software could perform in diverse, messy and unpredictable real-world environments, Teo Canmetin, Juliette Zaccour and Luc Rocher write.

Facial recognition just passed 99.95% accuracy in the latest evaluations by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. But did you know that these numbers come from pristine lab conditions with small datasets, good lightning, and clear photos?

fascinating paper on 'character training' LLMs - models fine-tuned to be 'warmer' are significantly more likely to promote conspiracy theories or validate incorrect facts, particularly when users express sadness 🤯 arxiv.org/abs/2507.21919

🧵New research! People now use AI chatbots for therapy, friendship, and romance. These days, both specialised and general-purpose chatbots are built with a friendly, empathetic tone to best comfort users. We find this new trend is not just cosmetic but seriously harms user safety.

Our new investigation: Ireland's own goal Almost every department of the Irish Government and local authorities have installed Chinese surveillance systems. It is hard to travel in Ireland without being tracked by China’s Hikvision surveillance system. www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

We keep seeing these articles suggesting privacy is dead and we can all be tracked by all sort of apparatuses. We did the maths earlier this year in an article in Nature Communications, and none of this holds.

Powerful study forthcoming in PETS showing how Apple’s claims that the Apple Watch cannot be made to interoperate with Android are false. arxiv.org/html/2507.07...

A key recommendation is to be more precise with our language. We caution against using mentalistic terms like 'knows' or 'pretends' to describe model outputs, as it can imply a level of intentionality that may not be warranted by the evidence.

Boston Consulting Group modelled the costs of “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza and entered into a multimillion-dollar contract to help launch an aid scheme for the shattered enclave, a Financial Times investigation has found. www.ft.com/content/c0e6...

just received a promotion to associate professor, so i took this opportunity to redo my website (rocher.lc, feedback welcomed)! it looks a bit more boring that the previous version, but easier to read. and thank you everyone who supported me through the years, wouldn't have made it here with you! 🌱

If you like the work we do in the Synthetic Society Lab @ Oxford, please rejoice as we are hiring! We have an opening for a 3-year postdoctoral position in AI, Privacy, and Policy (closing 17 July). All the details on syntheticsociety.oii.ox.ac.uk/openings

If you like the work we do in the Synthetic Society Lab @ Oxford, please rejoice as we are hiring! We have an opening for a 3-year postdoctoral position in AI, Privacy, and Policy (closing 17 July). All the details on syntheticsociety.oii.ox.ac.uk/openings

Had a lovely time at FAccT in Athens earlier this week. Attached photos of me, beans, cat hotels, lime&basil ice cream.

Join us for the @queerinai.com social at #FAccT2025 during the 10:15am coffee break on Monday! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

New paper out today, accepted at #FAccT2025, led by Jake Stein and me: "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing" arxiv.org/abs/2506.15278 Over the last 3 years, we've been working with @workerinfox.bsky.social to audit Uber's algorithms. 1/

If your university is using CoreHR for recruitment, you may be familiar with these application pack PDFs that have 100s of pages. I wrote a small Python package to automatically split them into one PDF per applicant. github.com/synthetic-so...

🔥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*!

ICYMI: Franziska Sofia Hafner, doctoral researcher @oii.ox.ac.uk along with @anavaldi.bsky.social and @rocher.lc, explore whether large language models are perpetuating gender stereotypes. Read more here: www.ox.ac.uk/news/feature...

@mcsoxford.bsky.social who are responsible for the "seasonal" traffic on Iffley Rd want a new building. Coaches and cars clog up Iffley Rd in their term time. Demand that they address their community's #antisocialparking. No Consultation here www.mcsconsultation.com Get off Iffley Rd!

Magdalen College School must 'take the coaches off The Plain', according to a new campaign. The city centre private school plans to demolish buildings for a science centre, but without providing coach parking for its own school buses, which currently drop off at the roundabout. plainview.carrd.co

New! Latest study from @oii.ox.ac.uk researchers Franziska Sofia Hafner, @anavaldi.bsky.social and @rocher.lc shows how AI language models encode a flawed understanding of gender. This poses risks for transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender individuals, particularly with AI used in health tech. 1/5

The OII's Dr @rocher.lc is cited in a @newscientist.com piece highlighting concerns over AI trained on 57m NHS medical records. “Building powerful generative AI models that protect patient privacy is an open, unsolved scientific problem,” says Dr Luc Rocher. www.newscientist.com/article/2479...

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

Come and be my colleague! We're looking for a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Health and Medicine, and Public Health! Deadline 20th April! Amazing colleagues and at the heart of London! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMN070/l...

We have an endowed chair in AI here at St Andrews. Closing date 5 May. Please consider applying. It would be great to have a new colleague interested in ethics or regulation (that said, I am not on the hiring panel). www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

PSA: many UK public services, and universities, rely on “Protective Domain Name Service”, a national service which blocks all Internet domains less than 30 days old. Worth knowing if you create a website for a new initiative or project. It will be blocked across the UK.

The New York Times is the first to put out comprehensive estimates on the cost of a year without U.S.A.I.D. and they’re higher than I thought: - 1.65 million deaths from AIDS - 500,000 from lack of vaccines - 550,000 from lack of food aid - 290,000 from malaria - 310,000 from TB

That’s a good advice. When I started reviewing at conferences, I thought I had to review everything even if the assignment seemed off, and did the “I don’t understand much but …” which the program chair quickly caught. Never too late to say “sorry but I really shouldn’t review this in the end”.

AI ID tech got a boost! New Bayesian model predicts effectiveness, accurately ID'ing populations. 🌐 Sizzles from small datasets to massive scales. Curious? #AIRevolution PMID:39788959, Nat Commun 2025, @NatureComms https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-55296-6

Let's talk about this Nature piece in more detail. I've rarely read something so anti-scientific anywhere short of the National Review. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Faculty of Social Sciences at Univ. of Helsinki invites applications for the position of UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN SOCIAL DATA SCIENCE for a permanent appointment starting 1st of September 2025. jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

A new paper, collaborated on with Associate Professor Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social is to be presented at CHI 2025 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems). Find the paper below. @oii.ox.ac.uk

How is your Friday going? This is me trying to figure out how to get a new French passport after the UK Home Office lost it somewhere in Swindon…

@lujain.bsky.social has published an excellent new paper exploring anthropomorphic behaviours in LLMs. Notable finding - majority of these behaviours occur after multi-turn interactions arxiv.org/abs/2502.07077

Algorithms are now making critical decisions across sectors. And yet, independent investigations of discriminatory decisions are stymied by strong barriers to data access. Our new research article just accepted at CHI establishes (minimum) data access requirements for rigorous audits.

Our workshop has been extended till Feb 20. We are looking forward for your papers at NAACL's Queer in AI workshop.

🤖 Thrilled to announce my incoming keynote lecture at the Global Media Management Annual Symposium (University of Southampton, UK). "Can we work it out? The future of labour, media, and technologies" February 19, 2025. wsagmm.wordpress.com @oiioxford.bsky.social

We're featured in the “AI and machine learning” and “Applied physics and mathematics” best articles of Nature Communications. I guess I can call myself a physicist and mathematician now. ;)

KGI’s submission builds on crucial work to expand platform transparency by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research @geurkink.bsky.social, @olivermmarsh.bsky.social, @rocher.lc, @henrytuck.bsky.social, and countless others!

As platforms restrict independent researchers from accessing platform data, governments will set the standard for data access. KGI submitted research-based input highlighting the need for @Ofcom, UK’s regulator of communications services, to expand platform data access . bit.ly/3E0udvI

Not often do we see an official FRS, Fellow of the Royal Society, performing a heil hitler salute live in front of such a large audience. Surely the Royal Society is already investigating and will take a prompt decision in the coming days.

🚨 In a new paper in @NatureComms, we propose a scaling law for identification technologies, from browser and device fingerprinting 🌐 to facial recognition 📸 and stylometry ✍️. A thread 🧵:

A scaling law to model the effectiveness of identification techniques www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Which mechanisms for public access of private data are most effective? What can policymakers learn about the challenges involved? Our latest blog post examines two case studies which show how access to private data can help deliver societal benefit. www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/access-...

How easy is it to identify users, and does the increasing capability of AI challenge our current understanding of privacy and anonymity? www.nature.com/articles/s41...