We have a new paper in Science Advances proposing a simple test for bias: Is the same person treated differently when their race is perceived differently? Specifically, we study: is the same driver likelier to be searched by police when they are perceived as Hispanic rather than white? 1/

New #NeurIPS2025 paper: how should we evaluate machine learning models without a large, labeled dataset? We introduce Semi-Supervised Model Evaluation (SSME), which uses labeled and unlabeled data to estimate performance! We find SSME is far more accurate than standard methods.

selfishly i wish we could keep divya in our lab forever but i guess it would be a disservice to the rest of the world 😅 she’s been such a wonderful mentor to me—i’ve learned a lot from how thoughtful, creative, and knowledgeable she is about everything. she’s also super funny and amazing at baking 🤭

Meeting Divya 5 years ago was one of the biggest strokes of luck in my faculty career - she is a brilliant scientist who has been foundational to so many of our lab's projects, and any institution would be lucky to hire her.

🚨 New postdoc position in our lab at Berkeley EECS! 🚨 (please reshare) We seek applicants with experience in language modeling who are excited about high-impact applications in the health and social sciences! More info in thread 1/3

📢New POSITION PAPER: Use Sparse Autoencoders to Discover Unknown Concepts, Not to Act on Known Concepts Despite recent results, SAEs aren't dead! They can still be useful to mech interp, and also much more broadly: across FAccT, computational social science, and ML4H. 🧵

SF fog coming up to swallow us in time lapse.

Honored to win a #CHIL2025 best paper award for our work modeling inequality in disease progression, led by @ericachiang.bsky.social! To the NIH: health inequality remains a vital topic to support the health of all Americans. As we prove, failing to account for it biases estimates for everyone.

For folks at @facct.bsky.social, our very own @cornellbowers.bsky.social student @emmharv.bsky.social will present the Best-Paper-Award-winning work she led on Wednesday at 10:45 AM in the "Audit and Evaluation Approaches" session! In the meantime, 🧵 below and 🔗 here: arxiv.org/abs/2506.04419 !

assassinations, handcuffing a senator at press conference, marines detaining a civilian, and a military parade for the president’s birthday. rough week for democracy.

and... here is the actual GIF 🙈

The first paper of @ericachiang.bsky.social's PhD, just accepted at #CHIL2025, proposes a model of disease progression which estimates and accounts for 3 types of health disparities to more accurately measure disease severity. See her full thread below!

The US government recently flagged my scientific grant in its "woke DEI database". Many people have asked me what I will do. My answer today in Nature. We will not be cowed. We will keep using AI to build a fairer, healthier world. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A pleasure to join the Tech Policy Press podcast with @natematias.bsky.social, @geomblog.bsky.social, and @justinhendrix.bsky.social to defend the consensus that AI bias is an important concern.

Lab had dogathon! Seminal dog discoveries ensued.

Migration data is critical in the health, environmental, and social sciences. We're releasing a new dataset, MIGRATE: annual flows between 47 billion pairs of US Census areas. MIGRATE is: - 4600x more granular than existing public data - highly correlated with external ground-truth data 1/2

💡New preprint & Python package: We use sparse autoencoders to generate hypotheses from large text datasets. Our method, HypotheSAEs, produces interpretable text features that predict a target variable, e.g. features in news headlines that predict engagement. 🧵1/

We have a new method, HypotheSAEs, for identifying *interpretable text features that predict a target variable* (aka hypothesis generation). What features of a headline predict engagement? What features of a clinical note predict whether a patient will develop cancer? 1/

Humbled and honored to receive this award -- thank you, @sloanfoundation.bsky.social, for supporting STEM research!

Applications are open for the Machine Learning in Economics Summer Institute (MLESI) 2025 are open! If you're a graduate student, come learn about ML/AI and its uses throughout economics. Apply by March 28. The application and more info can be found here: www.chicagobooth.edu/research/cen...

New piece in Nature: @leahpierson.bsky.social and I argue that philanthropic funders should shield science from cuts the Trump administration may make to climate science, infectious disease, etc. Free access link: rdcu.be/d6aul Longer version on my website: shorturl.at/muwts

Our article on using LLMs to promote health equity is out in New England Journal of Medicine AI! 85% of equity-related LLM papers focus on *harms*. But also vital are the equity-related *opportunities* LLMs create: detecting bias, extracting structured data, and improving access to health info.

Oregon stars. Happy holidays to all!

Some holiday reading if you're looking for an accessible, up-to-date overview of the fast-moving generative AI in medicine literature - our new paper, to appear in Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science!

I'm in Vancouver and will be giving a spotlight talk at #ML4H tomorrow, Dec. 15, at 4:30pm on some ongoing work on modeling multi-stage selection problems in clinical settings. Work done with (high school senior!) Sophia Lin, Bonnie Berger, and @emmapierson.bsky.social. I hope to see you there!

31% of US adults use generative AI for healthcare 🤯But most AI systems answer questions assertively—even when they don’t have the necessary context. Introducing #MediQ a framework that enables LLMs to recognize uncertainty🤔and ask the right questions❓when info is missing: 🧵

Hello...world? Trying to reconstruct my academic networks over here :) Follow me if we know each other or if you're interested in machine learning for healthcare/social equity! Please retweet, or resky, or whatever they call it over here.