I gave talks at MIT and Harvard this week about "Science with synthetic data". How can generative models help us learn about the actual world (e.g., social systems) in a principled way? Lots of interesting conversations -- more convinced than ever that there's nuanced issues to navigate here.

I’m recruiting students this upcoming cycle at UIUC! I’m excited about Qs on societal impact of AI, especially human-AI collaboration, multi-agent interactions, incentives in data sharing, and AI policy/regulation (all from both a theoretical and applied lens). Apply through CS & select my name!

We're in the process of selecting the location for next year's ACM EAAMO conference! If you're interested in bringing the EAAMO community to your institution, please check out the open call here and get in touch. conference.eaamo.org/call_for_loc...

How can synthetic data from LLMs be used, e.g. for social science, in a principled way? Check out Emily's thread on our NeurIPS paper! Generating paired real-synthetic samples and using both in a method-of-moments framework enables valid inference that benefits when synthetic data is informative.

Are you a researcher using computational methods to understand cities? @mfranchi.bsky.social @jennahgosciak.bsky.social and I organize an EAAMO Bridges working group on Urban Data Science and we are looking for new members! Fill the interest form on our page: urban-data-science-eaamo.github.io

New piece, out in the Sigecom Exchanges! It's my first solo-author piece, and the closest thing I've written to being my "manifesto." #econsky #ecsky arxiv.org/abs/2507.03600

Submit an abstract to present a poster at EAAMO, deadline July 25! EAAMO is one of my favorite conferences, and a great place for anyone working on ML/algorithms/optimization in social settings. The conference is in Pittsburgh this November. conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for...

ACM EAAMO, which is coming to Pitt this Fall, has two events for students: a doctoral consortium and a poster session, both of which are due July 25th - poster session conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for... - doctoral consortium conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for...

Excited to share that our paper "Learning treatment effects while treating those in need" received the exemplary paper award for AI at EC 2025! This paper grew out collaborations with Allegheny County's human services department and my co-author Pim Welle (at ACDHS). arxiv.org/abs/2407.07596

CMU is hosting a workshop on Human-AI Complementarity for Decision Making this September! Abstract submissions due July 15, travel will be covered for accepted presenters. www.cmu.edu/ai-sdm/resea...

Excited to have this work out at ICML this year! Do LLMs make correlated errors? Yes, and those by the same company, and also more accurate/later generations are more correlated -- increasing algorithmic monoculture arxiv.org/abs/2506.07962

Still thinking about this post. The broader point, which should resonate way beyond the specific issue of "peer review," is that human disagreement is not friction and waste. It's a load-bearing, functional part of social and intellectual systems.

Thoughtful take on one aspect of the increasing problem of LLMs leading to “centralization” of thought/writing/etc.

I didn't know about this, but this is objectively procedurally terrible. See Bryan's great analysis 👇 Yes, peer review needs help, but not like this.

Quite the insightful post about the use of LLMs in peer-review. Since that ship has left the stable, let's understand and mitigate the possible adverse effects. bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev... E.g., "scientists should demand that any system used as part of peer review be openly accessible"

This is absolutely frightening.

Should LLMs be used to review papers? AAAI is piloting LLM-generated reviews this year. I wrote a blog post arguing that using LLMs as reviewers can have bad downstream consequences for science by centralizing judgments about what constitutes good research. bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev...

Paper: Deep RL + mixed integer programming to plan for restless bandits with combinatorial (NP-hard) constraints. with @brwilder.bsky.social, Elias Khalil, @milindtambe-ai.bsky.social Poster #416 on Friday @ 3–5:30pm bsky.app/profile/lily...

Updated abstract deadline is this Thursday, with full paper deadline the following Thursday! Please submit your papers. We will support hybrid presentations for those unable to travel. There is also a non-archival option for those who would like to submit the paper to a journal in the future!

🚨 Call for Papers – #EAAMO25 🚨 We invite researchers, practitioners & policymakers to submit work on equity, access, & fairness in algorithms, optimization & mechanism design. 📅 Abstracts due Apr-17 📅 Papers due April-24 🔗 Learn more: conference.eaamo.org/cfp/

Couldn't find a machine learning for health starter pack so I made one.  DM/Reply if you want to be added! go.bsky.app/PJKJ8vK

Great starting point for algorithmic decision making on bsky!