Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

I guess I should feel flattered that AI models keep hallucinating papers that I didn't actually write? The latest example is "Where reinforcement learning meets process control" which I apparently co-authored with Kumar and Yu. #ADIPEC 1/n

A broken university system is letting Australia down https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/a-broken-university-system-is-letting-australia-down/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-broken-university-system-is-letting-australia-down #auspol

@clarivate.com says it takes retractions into account when calculating its highly coveted researcher designations. But Qusay Hassan, who has had 21 papers retracted, was one of several scientists winning accolades at the ministry’s Iraq Education Conference 2025 in Baghdad earlier this month.

New #J2C Certification: Demonstration-Guided Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Junlin Lu, Patrick Mannion, Karl Mason https://openreview.net/forum?id=FQAgFgkaFG #reinforcement #demonstrations #objective

I'm feeling much more organised after tidying up my office yesterday. I finally have all my ducks in a row.

Congratulations to @ffelten.bsky.social whose thesis on multi-objective reinforcement learning was deservedly awarded the Luxembourg National Research Fund's Outstanding PhD Thesis Award 🏆 As a side-benefit, we get this great accessible introduction to MORL video: youtu.be/VEXRuhJDkoA

It's been 8 months since I notified @springernature.com of a clear-cut case of fake references in a book chapter which they published. They have still not taken any action as they claim to still be investigating. I will not review for Springer again until this matter is satisfactorily resolved.

Hey @springernature.com. What was the point in me setting my status to Paused on the Reviewer Dashboard yesterday if you're going to send me another review today anyway? Not to mention that paper was 99% unrelated to my area of research. Don't turn into MDPI.

The viral "Definition of AGI" paper tells you to read fake references which do not exist! Proof: different articles present at the specified journal/volume/page number, and their titles exist nowhere on any searchable repository. Take this as a warning to not use LMs to generate your references!

Is anyone else on Overleaf's free plan? Have you had issues with compile time-outs? I gather that the time-limit for compilation on the free plan was cut in Aug, but it's only in the last few days that I've had problems. Today I can't even compile a 2-page document with no tables or figures.

Dear Benjamin, Congrats on being the fastest scammy conference organiser of all time. Inviting me to a conference unrelated to the topic of my paper is highly questionable, but you did it within a day of publication so at least you’re fast. Kindly remove me from your mailing list. Regards, Peter

Computer says sorry? After months in copy-editing hell, Haddie Harland's review of AI apology research is now available: link.springer.com/article/10.1... This is a must read for anyone interested in how AI systems can effectively and appropriately use apologies to facilitate human interaction 1/2

Decisions, decisions. Which should I read first?

Dsouza, Ofosu, Amaogu, Pigeon, Boudreault, Maghoul, Moreno-Cruz, Leonenko: BoreaRL: A Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Environment for Climate-Adaptive Boreal Forest Management https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19846 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19846 https://arxiv.org/html/2509.19846

Lingxiao Kong, Cong Yang, Oya Deniz Beyan, Zeyd Boukhers Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Optimization: Visionary Perspective https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21613

The deadline for my postdoc on scalable clinical decision support is closing in 1 week: 4 October (Australian Eastern standard Time). Please share with anyone that you think would be interested

Dear authors who I shall not name. Thank you for citing my work. But I'm not sure that a paper dating from 1995 should be cited in the context of a paragraph which begins "Recent trends show...."

⚠️ The #CHI2026 paper I submitted? It almost didn't exist. That's the BTS part academics never post. So I will…to normalize what I call unglamorous persistence. This summer was one of my hardest, mentally. 🌥️ Between ... 1/n

Hey! There's finally someone else in Australia doing research in multi-objective reinforcement learning. @marcusgal.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14816

Almost 7 months ago I reported a book chapter to Springer's Ethics reporting team. Springer have yet to take any action (they are 'still investigating'). That chapter now has 450 downloads and 2 citations. Delays in dealing with these issues allow further pollution of the scientific literature.

I'm hiring again! Please share. I'm recruiting a postdoc research fellow in human-centred AI for scalable decision support. Join us to investigate how to balance scalability and human control in medical decision support. Closing date: 4 October (AEST). uqtmiller.github.io/recruitment/

AI-SearchPlanner: Modular Agentic Search via Pareto-Optimal Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Huawei proposes an RL framework that decouples search planning from answer generation, using dual-reward alignment and Pareto optimization. 📝 arxiv.org/abs/2508.20368

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) offers a more robust and adaptable solution by optimizing for a vector of rewards—such as fairness, diversity, and ethical norms. The resulting behaviors support transparency, explainability, and human alignment.

Imagine a future where all of the world's scientific knowledge has been captured and organized in a way that (a) permits tracing back to the supporting data and reasoning and (b) identifying situations in which the knowledge could be applied. 2/

Anyone who plans to submit for an ARC grant should be giving feedback via this survey.

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

My petition to the 🇦🇺 Australian government: make part-time PhD students' stipends tax exempt! 📋 Read and sign here: www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/... ⏰ Deadline: October 1

The Sony AI Game AI team has reinforcement learning internships opens for 2026! It is remote for people in the US & Canada, mixed remote/onsite in Europe (onsite in Zurich), and onsite in Tokyo. If you want to work on RL with cool applications, sign up! ai.sony/joinus/job-r...

1/8 🧵 GPT-5's storytelling problems reveal a deeper AI safety issue. I've been testing its creative writing capabilities, and the results are concerning - not just for literature, but for AI development more broadly. 🚨

Is ResearchGate's user base dying? Reads and Full-text Reads of my papers peaked back in 2021, and have fallen by about 50% since then. Citations of my work have continued to rise, so I don't think this is caused by people losing interest in my work :-)

Wouldn't it be nice if the ARC assessed proposals in a similar way to the NIH? Quoted from www.the-scientist.com/an-nih-revie... "The last factor evaluates the principal investigator (PI) or multiple PI (MPI) team, co-investigators, consultants, and institutions involved...

This relates to my previous post, but I wanted to keep it separate to avoid interfering with any discussion of the important content of Kewen's paper. On a personal note, I'm delighted that we managed to slip this footnote in, explaining why our algorithm is called MOSS.

Are you having trouble applying multi-objective reinforcement learning to a stochastic environment? Do you want to know why? Kewen Ding's new paper provides insights (available via open-access here: doi.org/10.1017/S026...).

New in @theconversation.com today from @suzesrdarov.bsky.social and I: ‘Australiana’ images made by AI are racist and full of tired cliches, new study shows theconversation.com/australiana-... [1/2]

🚀 Introducing EngiBench & EngiOpt A unified benchmark and algorithm suite for ML-driven engineering design. 💡 Imagine: • A diffusion model for designing airplane wings • Surrogate models predicting DcGain & Voltage Ripple in power electronics 🧵⬇️

New blog post: AI Allergy. On my increasing disgust with the AI discourse, even though I still like the technical and philosophical. And how I wish I could be excited about AI again. togelius.blogspot.com/2025/08/ai-a...

Australian-based researchers: just a reminder that before 19 Aug, you should set up multi-factor authentication for the RMS: www.arc.gov.au/news-publica... 1. Log in to RMS. 2. Go to ‘Personal Details’ in Action Centre. 3. Click ‘MFA Settings’. Follow the prompts. Took me 60 seconds.

I think I could handle the whole "unpaid labour" aspect of peer reviewing much more easily if it didn't also involve dealing with the never-ending inadequacy of Editorial Manager.

New from me: When Australian AI expert Dr Kobi Leins declined a medical specialist’s request to use AI transcription software during her child’s upcoming appointment, the practice told her the practitioner required the technology be used and Leins was "welcome to seek an alternative" provider. 👇

Dear journal copy editors. Yes, I am the corresponding author, but I am not the first author. So why have you listed "Vamplew et al." in the running header of the proof you just sent me? 🤦‍♂️

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

At last I have an opportunity to engage in some Schmidhubering 😊 I was excited to recently discover the paper Expected Eligibility Traces by Hado van Hasselt et al ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AA... (AFAIK none of these authors are on bsky yet). 🧵 (a short one!)

Imagine if all the money academics pour into OA fees at for-profit publishing corporations went instead to academic societies, which exist to support science; or to university presses, which exist to support academia

HOW DO I LOG IN TO EDITORIAL MANAGER TO SUBMIT MY REVIEW

Seeing I shut down my X account, I might repost some of my more interesting (at least to me!) previous threads here. First up: Pete's Odd Adventures in Academic Publishing - Episode 3: The Phantom Author. This is going to be a lengthy post, but bear with me - the bizarreness merits full details.

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

At last we've discovered AI's true purpose: suno.com/song/f3a174d...