Breaking: A federal court has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing an immigration policy targeting noncitizen researchers, advocates, fact-checkers, and trust and safety workers based on their work. knightcolumbia.org/content/fede...

Syllabus fodder! Our book is out NOW and open access for 2 weeks. Download it and take your pick of any of my FIVE amazing coauthors to lecture in your comparative politics, American politics, social movement, research methods, or digital politics syllabus. doi.org/10.1017/9781...

ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)

I like this. If the paper contains hallucinated references, how can we trust anything else in it? By the way, I'll present our experience developing and using the hallucinator tool next week at MetaCrisp (co-located with IEEE S&P)! 📄 seclab.bu.edu/people/gianl... 💾 github.com/gianlucasb/h...

My university administrators censored a student who put “environmental justice” and “communities disproportionately affected by climate change” on an Earth Day flyer. I really have no words to express my anger and disappointment anymore

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Gptzero thinks that the ACM copyright block is written by AI...

🚨 NSF is already quietly eliminating the SBE Directorate, despite Congress’ mandate that NSF support the behavioral & social sciences. Steps to counter this are in motion. If you - have an SBE proposal under review - serve on an SBE grant panel You can help! Fill out this form: shorturl.at/xuKw2

Boston University’s student paper, The Daily Free Press, reports about the multiplication of pride flags on campus following the administration’s attempted crackdown on free speech.

If you are interested in doing high-impact, public-facing research ... Join Our Research Team! We are hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. socialmedialab.ca/2026/03/04/p... #PhDSky #AcademicSky #comsky

This Fall, I’m joining the University of Georgia as an Assistant Professor! I want to push on the fundamentals of software reverse engineering, from decompilation to how humans actually understand code. I’m looking for PhD students, collaborators, and sponsors. More below.

The US and Canada go to Daylight Savings Time tomorrow morning.

Our paper "Loki: Proactively discovering online scams by mining toxic search queries" won a Distinguished Paper Award at NDSS 2026! 📜 arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12181

Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out! github.com/gianlucasb/h...

Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out! github.com/gianlucasb/h...

“If America’s university presidents believe that their foremost responsibility is simply to keep their institutions operational — collecting tuition and protecting endowments — they are mistaken… presidents and chancellors are stewards of intellectual freedom and democratic norms.”

💥The year starts with great news:💥 🍾Àlex' paper accepted at USENIX Sec🎉 He demonstrates how suppression (and: sampling as one special case) may amplify privacy but yields disproportionate utility loss. It's been hard work: 🚀per aspera ad astra🌟 Congrats, we're proud! arxiv.org/abs/2601.05180

The way I interpret this, is that this is finally the year of Linux on the desktop

🚨 New working paper 🚨 What happens when you add money + competition to generative AI creation? On Civitai—a prominent platform for gen-AI content/tools w. millions of users—you get a growing marketplace for NSFW requests and a nontrivial stream of deepfakes. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.09117 🧪

Universities, companies, and government agencies that continue to operate on X, now that this is clearly documented (majority of content included sexualized images of women and children) are actively supporting "industrial-scale abuse." Paid subscribers can still do this.

Happy start of the semester!

1/ Thoughts on the state of federal higher ed policy: Showing the limits of Trump’s power, he asked Congress to gut research funding, cut access programs, and end support for MSIs. Congress said no. But … the government will need to stay open and Trump will have to approve the funding packages.

⏰ Less than two weeks left to apply! @isi.it & CRT Foundation offer 10 one-year scholarships in data science & AI, applied to: 🩺 public health · 🌍 humanitarian response · 🏙️ urban development · ♻️ sustainability 📅 Deadline: Feb 2, 2026 🔗 Details here: sites.google.com/view/lagrang...

Senior academic roles in Cyber Security at De Montfort University Leicester (ACE-CSE Gold; 20+ academics in cyber; great facilities; research links with AI and with social responsibility), professor and associate professor. Closing 18 Jan.

Folks, she brought a whole plate of spaghetti to the broadcast center to do her headshot. She then houses that spaghetti. Mattia sips on an espresso during his. Truly the heroes we need during these times.

My daily audience while writing grant proposals

The fun thing about watching the movie 2001 in 2025 is you realize HAL is just an LLM and so *obviously* it’s going to murder its crewmembers every few flights due to malformed JSON.

2025 was a tough year, but we are still here. To all academics out there, may 2026 be a great year! 🎉

PhD students in AI: Bell Labs Cambridge is hiring Summer 2026 interns in Social & #ResponsibleAI. Paid, 3 months, visa support, publication-focused. Work on AI ethics, risk, governance, and human values. Deadline: Jan 11, 2026.

The 2025 @acsacconf.bsky.social is ready to start! Looking forward to three days of papers and discussions. Come say hi if you are around!

Our paper "The Cost of Convenience: Identifying, Analyzing, and Mitigating Predatory Loan Applications on Android" was accepted at ASIACCS 2026! Work led by my student Olawale Akanji. Stay tuned for the PDF!

When people falsely claim that we are doing censorship work, I think, in many cases, what they are trying to do is stop us from trying to understand the harms they are trying to push...using bad information. m.youtube.com/watch?v=kFoO...

Just accepted at #AAAI26 in Singapore: Our paper on estimating the *correctness* of LLM-generated code in the absence of oracles (e.g., a ground-truth implementation). 📝 arxiv.org/abs/2507.00057 with Thomas Valentin (ENS Paris-Saclay), Ardi Madadi, and Gaetano Sapia (#MPI_SP).

Great visiting KIT yesterday. Thanks for hosting me!

This is a remarkable case of Chinese authorities threatening a UK university into halting research on human rights violations, and the university acquiescing.

Looking forward to visiting Karlsruhe next week!

Exciting position @northeasternu.bsky.social ! Managing Policy Director at the new Institute for Information, & Democracy, please share with interested parties. northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/career...

"Vanderbilt is failing in its moral responsibility to push back against rising authoritarianism and political coercion." My effort to convince Vanderbilt (and all universities) to take a stand for the rule of law, the Constitution, and our democracy. www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

5. For example, research produced and funded by tech companies often either frames problems as user-driven, or explores solutions as the obligation of users (e.g. community notes). Seldom does it explore consequences of design, UX, or algorithmic implementation, let alone the business model.

🌟 Want to help shape #MADWeb 2026? Nominate yourself for the Program Committee! Deadline: Oct 31, 2025 ⏰ Consider applying even if you don't have extensive reviewing experience! forms.gle/UovLWS78aa3t...

Here is a story about a AAAI paper that got 5 human reviews and 1 AI review. The AI generated review contained a page-long counterexample to a proof in the paper. The AI’s counter example contained hallucinated errors. How does one rebut an AI reviewer? www.linkedin.com/posts/omerbp...

We turned our pain into a research paper… documenting how our collaborative research team (which included researchers at a public university) navigated a slew of public records requests (by some of the same folks who have since turned their attention towards attacking academia more broadly).

AI predicts rain. We predict trouble! Today, Erik presents a novel attack on Google's latest AI weather model at #CCS2025. By changing only 0.1% of the observations, the attack can fabricate or suppress the prediction of extreme events, from hurricanes 🌀 to heat waves 🔥 1/4 @bifold.berlin

Join us 10/29 for a Focused Research Program symposium that will bring together experts in AI, medical imaging, clinical medicine, and public health to share advances in AI-driven early detection and equitable care. spr.ly/63323AtxxB

MIT President Sally Kornbluth just issued a statement to the campus community saying NO to Trump’s authoritarian compact “And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”

Researchers develop AI system to detect scam websites in search results 📖 Read more: www.helpnetsecurity.com/2025/10/09/l... #cybersecurity #cybersecuritynews #cybercrime #machinelearning #scams @bostonu.bsky.social @gianlucastringhini.com

Nice article covering our upcoming NDSS paper www.helpnetsecurity.com/2025/10/09/l...

Bluesky runs on open protocols with open source code. Today we’re taking an additional step and making a patent non-aggression pledge to ensure that everyone can build confidently on our work. Learn more and read the pledge in our blog post: bsky.social/about/blog/1...

Several scientists have received letters from the NIH director disinviting them from their positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant funding, I'm told. In July, I reported that NIH staff were told to select members aligned with Trump administration priorities.