📢 Woot! Congrats to Sarmad, Sharaf, and @ethankutlu.bsky.social for this years' ICWSM's best paper! For those who weren't there for the actual talk. (A while back) I had a made an explainer youtu.be/QRBiv84Aaak

I am currently at @icwsm.bsky.social . We (Sarmad, Sharaf, @ethankutlu.bsky.social ) will be presenting our paper "Flattening Fantasies: Analysing Stereotypes in Pornographic Discourse" in the 4:00-5:00 session . Come say Hi! (It just won the best paper award)

🚨 I am functionally iliterate when it comes to Urdu on the internet. So I made a couple of web extensions to render Urdu text into Nastaliq, to help readability For Chrome: chromewebstore.google.com/detail/osama... and Firefox: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo...

Iowa City, a role model! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/c... (archive.ph/lEmzI)

🚨 Weekend Project: I finally finished a small project I've been working on. A web extension to solve my personal language learning problem! www.youtube.com/shorts/XsAdZ... 1/n

ProPublica spoke to about 150 people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.” We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words. ➡️ This is what they wrote: projects.propublica.org/impact-of-ho...

"When the public discourse focuses on whether chatbots have consciousness, we're not talking about documented harms like privacy violations, algorithmic bias... The fake risk of sentient AI provides perfect cover for ignoring real risks that affect real people today" www.readtpa.com/p/stop-prete...

Swahili’s long history as a ‘language on the road’ has traversed 19th-century trade routes, entered 20th-century classrooms, carried Julius Nyerere on his political ‘safaris’, and forged connections across Africa. www.historytoday.com/archive/behi...

🚨 Weekend project: Urdu Audiobook Generation: youtube.com/watch?v=PYrO... Urdu is generally considered a low-resource language[1], and there isn't enough training data to build high-quality systems. I wanted to explore how far I can push TTS (text-to-speech) in Urdu. 1/3

letterformarchive.org/news/this-ju... Chopstick sleeves can be both functional and cultural artifacts.

Since the Chagos Islands are back in the news. www.bbc.com/news/article... On the issue with domain names (e.g. .io , .tv, .nu) and digital colonialism www.wired.com/story/the-di... Archived: archive.ph/im6HN

Among the many applications of stylometry... weaponizing language (or any technology) as a tool of prosecution always leaves a bad taste in my mouth www.thedial.world/articles/new...

Executions of the conceivably innocent are no better than human sacrifice latimes.com/opinion/stor... "When we kill the guilty, we become needlessly cruel. When we kill the conceivably innocent, we become a mockery of ourselves and our supposed allegiance to justice."

Thats it! I am leaving academia and becoming a YouTuber!

📢 Osama Khalid (osamakhalid.bsky.social) will defend his doctoral thesis "Charting Sensorial Style: New Frontiers in Linguistic Style Analysis" tomorrow Wednesday 11/20 at 10:15am in 2520C UCC. Deets at bit.ly/khalid_11_20 #FinalExam #PhDLife #UIowaGrad24 #AcademicSky #stylometry #linguistics 👨‍🎓 🤞

Did you know ى is more likely to occur at the end of a word than at the start. There are more words which start with م than there are words that end with it. Used Python+MATLAB+MSPaint to visualize how the letters in the #Urdu language are distributed within words.

What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase? TitleCase devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/...