We opened up applications for the Brown AI Policy Summer School! Please share with any computing or computational social science students who want to engage substantively with policymaking in the United States: cntr.brown.edu/summer-school. Deadline March 27th!!! Funding available!

"And we kissed, as though nothing could fall" -Ducki, probably

I feel we need a specific word for the incredible sense of awe and wonder you experience watching your friends defend PhD theses in areas you don't understand.

Super excited to be a nonres fellow at CDT!!

I've been surprised just how little we've been talking about privacy implications of frontier AI beyond training data. tl;dr -- the architecture of AI systems will matter a lot, and developers can act now to do better. New piece in @technologyreview.com: www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/28/1...

We are privileged that the world's best want to work with us and to study at our universities. Who in their right mind would give that up????

So cool!

Posted a very early stage draft with rock star collaborators. Key question: when we actually roll out AI tools, how do people use them? Do they just defer completely? Does it improve productivity and ability? We look in the medical setting of pulmonary embolisms paulgp.com/papers/Radio...

Not sure if this is a coincidence but this is also how my dog celebrated his birthday

Not sure if this is a coincidence but this is also how my dog celebrated his birthday

It's happening. OpenAI is piloting ads in ChatGPT. openai.com/index/our-ap... In introducing ads to ChatGPT, OpenAI is starting down a risky path. (1/5)

Today I got some (mostly positive, yay!) reviews back for a paper and one of them identified a "gorilla in the room" and another identified an "elephant in the room". So we're planning on letting the gorilla and the elephant duke it out.

Instead of using Gemini to write emails, what if, and this is a radical proposal, we just stopped writing emails?

Late notice, but: NIST has a multi-year, funded graduate fellowship + summer intern program (potentially with our team at CAISI!). Due January 15. stemfellowships.org/applicants/

I was so taken with @cyberlyra.bsky.social 's talk that I had to write an entire blog post (about it, but also about what the talk tells us about imagination and the AI moment). In a totally old-school unfashionable way, I'm not going to soundbite it here. RTWT: cntr.brown.edu/news/2025-12...

The ACM has now issued an official statement arguing against a federal moratorium on state AI regulation. www.acm.org/binaries/con...

We're admitting PhD students! (Possible co-PIs include @zittrain.bsky.social or @ianarawjo.bsky.social if interests align.) We're excited about: docs.google.com/document/d/1... Interested? Fill out the linked form & apply to Harvard SEAS (listing me as faculty of interest) by Dec 15th!

Also, our team is hiring an AI Research Scientist! www.usajobs.gov/job/851528400

such a good idea

I'm briefly stopping by #NeurIPS2025. I'll be at the alignment workshop, a mentor at WiML, and giving a talk about AI policy in the Education track on Tuesday. Let's hangggg

ACM members/computing researchers who should be members interested in contributing should join the subcommittee's mailing list! One of our goals here is to build policy coalitions across institutions so we can do more as a collective 💪 and balance special interest groups.

I think we do better!!! I even think if we look in the right places (survey science, demography, computational social sciences), we already know how to do better.

🚨The Formalism-Implementation Gap in RL research🚨 Lots of progress in RL research over last 10 years, but too much performance-driven => overfitting to benchmarks (like the ALE). 1⃣ Let's advance science of RL 2⃣ Let's be explicit about how benchmarks map to formalism 1/X

I receive so many questions about what research in civil society is like -- Join our virtual panel to hear more about exactly that! @cdt.org @datasociety.bsky.social @aclu.org With @thakurdhanaraj.bsky.social @alicetiara.bsky.social and @mkgerchick.bsky.social To register: cdt.org/event/advoca...

Natalie's stuff makes me want to pivot my research to focus on algorithmic collusion 😅

Calarina Muslimani is presenting at the Cohere RL group tomorrow October 23rd at 12pm EST about our work on "Towards Improving Reward Design in RL: A Reward Alignment Metric for RL Practitioners". This work won an ✨outstanding paper✨ award at RLC :D Link: cohere.com/events/coher...

I find CA Sen Weiner's AI policy prominence and upcoming challenge to Nancy Pelosi endlessly amusing. When we were 22, my tech bro friends and I mobilized to vote Sen Weiner into office bc of his campaign promise to keep SF nightlife open til 4. We just wanted to hang late at Armory Club, ya know.

I wrote a (personal) blog post about my hopes and dreams for AI policy, my devastation after the US Election, and my process of picking myself off the floor by rebuilding an optimistic vision for AI scientists in government through education: simons.berkeley.edu/news/rebuild...

Heading to #COLM2025! Catch me at the workshop on bridging NLP and public opinion research (NLPOR). I’ll be on a panel lamenting our approach to indirect and inscrutable content moderation through RLHF.

Important update about my dog's life

I'm nearly in Seoul for #CoRL2025, where I'll be presenting a talk on "Robots as the testbed for AI, AI as the testbed for Robots" at the Eval&Deploy workshop. Super excited to rep the newly formed Brown GIRAFFE Lab in the wild for the first time :D :D :D @confrobotlearning.bsky.social. Say hi!

The house approps budget is out, and it includes a very slight increase to the NIH budget. Senate approps committee held NSF funding steady. Don't back down from this fight!!! We must celebrate and share our wins, too, to build and maintain momentum. appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

This is totally unacceptable. I've followed Lisa Cook for a while since she has developed the leading perspective on AI over at the Fed: www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

Emma is amazing, you should apply.

Algorithmic Wage Discrimination is spreading beyond 'Gig' work: Healthcare, Customer Service, & Logistics bosses are buying AI products that set compensation structures & wages using real time data. @wilneida.bsky.social & I did an audit & here are our findings equitablegrowth.org/how-artifici...

One study shows four in ten data brokers are leaving consumers exercising their privacy rights on read—in violation of California law. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

We shouldn't just be aiming for whistleblower protections. We should borrow from finance land and create whistleblower *incentives* (www.sec.gov/enforcement-...).

The fun lil update is that this work won RLC Outstanding Paper in Emerging Topics :D. Work with Calarina Muslimani, Kerrick Johnstonbaugh, Suyog Chandramouli, @bradknox.bsky.social, and Matt Taylor.

We have two papers at #RLC! “Towards Improving Reward Design in RL: A Reward Alignment Metric for RL Practitioners”, lead by Callie Muslimani (Alberta) & “Goals vs. Rewards: Towards a Comparative Study of Objective Specification Mechanisms” lead by Septia Rani (CSU). Come to our posters today!

Applications are open for the Doctoral Consortium at the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society rcais.github.io. Taking place October 27, 2025. Applications received by September 15 will receive full consideration.

Fun fact - the ADA was a Republican endeavor, signed into law by H.W. My great hope for the nation is that we can find shared priorities and get all parties to work in the interests of the people. And maybe we can fix that ridiculous $2000 asset limit sometime???

Excited to be at #ICML2025 to present our paper on 'pragmatic misalignment' in (deployed!) RAG systems: narrowly "accurate" responses that can be profoundly misinterpreted by readers. It's especially dangerous for consequential domains like medicine! arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14898

I'll be presenting a position paper about consumer protection and AI in the US at ICML. I have a surprisingly optimistic take: our legal structures are stronger than I anticipated when I went to work on this issue in Congress. Is everything broken rn? Yes. Will it stay broken? That's on us.

There may be some tiny opening to save the NSF funding. It is worth calling your Senators. This is a big deal if it can be saved. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This algorithmic monoculture and AI collusion stuff is so insidious. We need to get ahead of this, both from technical and legislative perspectives! IMO our existing anticompete laws are not sufficient for the newest forms of correlated decision-making and influence before us.

I've struggled to announce this amidst so much dark & awful going on in the world, but with 1mo to go, I wanted to share that: (i) I finally graduated; (ii) In August, I'll begin as an assistant professor in the CS dept. of the National University of Singapore.

Complicated implications, but compelling research. I'd still bet the explanation requirement of ECOA has prevented a lot of discrimination because it puts an obstacle in place, but I wonder how well we can detect discrimination from human decision makers with explanations!

Zana does thoughtful work in XAI and human-AI teaming, and she's going to be a wonderful PI. I'm especially glad to keep her in the Boston area :)

Unhinged. We could (and I might even argue we should) accept preemption if Congress would act in good faith for the American people, but to both sit on their hands and to disallow others from taking action is beyond negligent.

I'm terribly sad that my fellowship at @simonsinstitute.bsky.social is ending tomorrow. I've spent my time here mostly writing about, thinking about, and giving talks on my policy experiences in the US Senate, and to organize the Brown CNTR AI Policy Summer School (cntr.brown.edu/summer-school).