I am flabbergasted I am by how much vibe coding has expanded my capacities as a scientist and teacher. In the last few weeks, I've mocked up class demos of a live turing test, generated cross-references for an encyclopedia, and prototyped new tablet tasks for developmental psych. It's wild.

to turn off autoplaying video on the bluesky mobile app select the icon in the top left corner go to settings go to content and media make sure "autoplay videos and gifs" is toggled off

Paul's back and he nails it here

✨The NLP+CSS workshop is returning to ACL 2026!✨ And this year, we have a new shared task with prizes! Website/CfP: sites.google.com/site/nlpandc... Deadlines: March 5 (direct), March 24 (pre-reviewed ARR) #NLProc #CompSocialSci #ComputationalSocialScience #ACL2026NLP @aclmeeting.bsky.social

"Why agent-based modeling could happen in economics. Eventually." Good piece by @mikemakowsky.bsky.social economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/29/p... I'd argue that the "new era of theory" is already underway, though, led not by economists, but by comp social sci/cultural evolution folks.

The next edition of the NLP+CSS will be at ACL 2026! It includes an open-ended shared task (work with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive) with travel grants as prizes!

Here at UMass Amherst CICS, we’re searching for TT faculty in NLP – see the link from www.cics.umass.edu/about/employ... I’m happy to answer questions of course, too!

re @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com on NSF support for the web www.liberalcurrents.com/marc-andrees... -- the NSF specifically gave $3.7M just for Mosaic www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/... and $4.6M for a related effort www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

i agree, huge change. also as a reviewer, it used to be other reviewers on a paper were non-anonymous. when i was junior, i found this motivating and conducive to learning & community-building - i might see a review i admired, then learn more about the reviewer's work and their way of thinking.

Great connections between our linguistics department and the CICS NLP program (including Katrin Erk now in a joint appointment). Also happy to communicate with prospective applicants.

Here at UMass Amherst CICS, we’re searching for TT faculty in NLP – see the link from www.cics.umass.edu/about/employ... I’m happy to answer questions of course, too!

the way this is going the only trustworthy information will be from in-person interviews. for annotation projects i find it much easier to trust small numbers of expert or local students annotators, compared to broad-audience online recruiting

i can’t believe how terrible larry summers is

(1/2) 🎉 New preprint: "Contextual Morphologically-Guided Tokenization for Latin Encoder Models" w/ @diyclassics.bsky.social @brenocon.bsky.social

The massacre of the ethics/safety teams and the internal reorientation away from anything that hinted at broader purpose (with exception for the more profitable bits of natsec) is a story that has yet to be properly told.

Your regular reminder that NSF is required by US law to support increasing the participation of historically less represented groups in science and technology fields

and (i believe) tal is presenting this work at the umass linguistics colloquium, this friday! ILC S211 at 3:30pm

Here’s a #COLM2025 feed! Pin it 📌 to follow along with the conference this week!

I have a new blog post about the so-called “tokenizer-free” approach to language modeling and why it’s not tokenizer-free at all. I also talk about why people hate tokenizers so much!

My #UMassAmherst colleagues Jen Lundquist and Kathy Forde ran a great workshop - "Reclaim the Narrative" at UMass last week on helping university staff and faculty tell stories about the importance of the work we do for our students and for society as a whole.

great paper! we already found it useful to inform another ongoing project (in more of a health domain; many domains face similar issues)

When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.

UMSI is running multiple searches this year, starting with the John Derby Evans Professor in Information, at the Assistant or Associate level! This is open to anyone working at the intersection of tech and society, with a closing date of Nov 1, 2025. Please share! www.si.umich.edu/people/facul...

LLMs introduce a huge range of new capabilities for research, but also make it possible for researchers to "hack" their results in new ways by how they chose to use models for annotation This is a useful pass at quantifying some of the risk, and some mitigation strategies arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

this is really bad (CW suicide discussion. a lot of it, thanks to chatgpt)

Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...

GPT-5 lands first place on NoCha, our long-context book understanding benchmark. That said, this is a tiny improvement (~1%) over o1-preview, which was released almost one year ago. Have long-context models hit a wall? Accuracy of human readers is >97%... Long way to go!

Terence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social) has written a thread on Mastodon about the impact of the federal grant freeze to UCLA, particularly to his own field of Mathematics. UCLA's IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics) could shut down entirely mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568...

Check this out! Happy to talk to folks about Valley living, feel free to DM.

You basically got it. He said "I would love to see the people who hire graduating PhD students say with a straight face right now that they would go ahead and hire students who had *only* done work on the small models that you were describing." (The full stream is available on underline)

The #ACL2025 #ACL2025NLP feed is up and running! It matches both hashtags and any posts from or mentions of @aclmeeting.bsky.social Pin it to your home 📌 and enjoy! bsky.app/profile/did:...

#acl2025 anyone get a good quote of phil resnik's last comment? context: (some?all?) panelists & him agree the field needs more deep, careful research on smaller models to do better science. everyone is frustrated with impossibility of large-scale pretraining experiments

Excited to present two papers at #ACL2025! 🗓️30 July, 11 AM: 𝛿-Stance: A Large-Scale Real World Dataset of Stances in Legal Argumentation. w/ Douglas Rice and @brenocon.bsky.social 📍At Hall 4/5. 🧵👇

🗓️29 July, 4 PM: Automated main concept generation for narrative discourse assessment in aphasia. w/ @marisahudspeth.bsky.social, Polly Stokes, Jacquie Kurland, and @brenocon.bsky.social 📍Hall 4/5. Come by to chat about argumentation, narrative texts, policy & law, and beyond! #ACL2025NLP

Highlighting this thread. Based on what I'm seeing at #ic2s2 this week, this line of work is hot (if a bit crowded), but I predict will only be more widely adopted by social scientists in the future.

🥳 🎉 ❤️ The ACL 2025 Proceedings are live on the ACL Anthology 🥰 ! We’re thrilled to pre-celebrate the incredible research 📚 ✨ that will be presented starting Monday next week in Vienna 🇦🇹 ! Start exploring 👉 aclanthology.org/events/acl-2... #NLProc #ACL2025NLP #ACLAnthology

Unfortunately I'm missing #ic2s2 but our work on practical event extraction & analyzing international news coverage bias will be presented there as well! this work --

🥲 The cost to future society will be much more than the dollars they think they’re saving #mathsky www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-...

Thanks to @masslive.bsky.social for great coverage of our @icwsm.bsky.social'25 study of global news coverage 📰! We show that deaths and 💰GDP💰 of event country are the strongest predictors of global news coverage of disasters and terrorist attacks (w @brenocon.bsky.social, @ethanz.bsky.social)!

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...

MorphScore got an update! MorphScore now covers 70 languages 🌎🌍🌏 We have a new-preprint out and we will be presenting our paper at the Tokenization Workshop @tokshop.bsky.social at ICML next week! @marisahudspeth.bsky.social @brenocon.bsky.social

AI & Society faculty opportunity posted just this month with a start date of Fall 2025 and beyond: www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/57734 ‼️🐂 For "interdisciplinary scholars whose research agenda connects the study of AI with humanistic and/or social scientific line(s) of study"

Excited to share our FAME method for news identification: Fingerprint-to-Article Matching for Events from a DB! We use it to study news coverage of disasters and conflicts (w @brenocon.bsky.social @ethanz.bsky.social). Check out our talk and poster at @icwsm.bsky.social!🧵👇 arxiv.org/abs/2506.12925

The DOD has long brought in outside council from academia. Academics don’t have skin in the game and offer less biased options. There is an increasing marginalization of academia, that the only action is in the big tech companies. It started before the current administration but is accelerating

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop! Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

With NSF cuts, my guess is that the best possible scenario right now is that AI/ML PhD graduates drop by only 50% in the next 3-4 years. I don't understand how tech and related companies are not freaking out about this.

Very smart, high ROI initiative from the Spencer Foundation. Providing bridge funding for canceled NSF grants: 1) directs funds to projects already screened by a top-noch review process. 2) avoids imposing proposal prep costs on researchers. 3) ameliorates the disruption from GOP sabotage.

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday 📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj