Watts & Strogatz (1998) except you’re living in the bad timeline that’s also the dumbest possible timeline. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/u...

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

i am looking for academic (or similarly "serious") courses or textbook-y texts on LLMs with a major component (lets say >66%) that is NOT about the technicalities of Transformers, optimization, RL, tokenization, etc, but instead focus more on data, eval, interpretability, etc. pointers?

Linguists/philosophers/logicians: What's the state-of-the-art on the formal semantics of social meaning? I think the formal pragmatics of it is pretty well developed, but the underlying semantics is often quite skeletal, more of a placeholder than a full model theory. 🐦🐦 #philsky

our favorite kids’ science show, Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, just lost its current NSF grant and has a fundraising event coming up: www.sciencepodcastforkids.com re QT below. i watched those as a kid! looks bad for the next generation

Dear science journalism, Please start including the funding source and whether it has been imperiled by the coup in your coverage of cool new science papers. The public should know the floor is being cut out from under us.

People keep plugging AI "Co-Scientists," so what happens when you ask them to do an important task like finding errors in papers? We built SPOT, a dataset of STEM manuscripts across 10 fields annotated with real errors to find out. (tl;dr not even close to usable) #NLProc arxiv.org/abs/2505.11855

if you didnt know, CS and data science masters programs are overwhelmingly comprised of tuition-paying international students. this change threatens many comp sci and related depts (among others!).

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone. So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment. It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/ expertvoicestogether.org

The National Science Foundation marks its 75th anniversary this week. Rather than celebrate, it's time to save it. www.savensf.com/nsf-at-75-to...

Everyone keeps saying that they can't say what they hope happens to the ICE agents who are doing this but I can - they're clearly engaged in gross violations of the law and I want every Democratic candidate from here to infinity to pledge to help prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law

🚨 Practical URGENT tip for NSF grantees: Out of an abundance of caution, I would right now go into Research.gov and… 1. Download your NSF award letters. 2. Print PDF your annual reports. 3. Screenshot the status table for annual reports. NSF is planning maintenance tomorrow to Research.gov

One of my PhD students got their visa revoked. I know of other cases amongst my AI colleagues. This is not what investing in US leadership in AI looks like. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/...

Hi Kate-- I'm really sorry to hear this. If NIH terminations are any guide, we expect NSF terminations to be chaotic, so we're trying to track them and organize the information. If don't mind, please have your team enter their grants here: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni... And please spread the word.

AI industry giants owe their existence to taxpayer-funded, open research, but many have abandoned this collaborative model. I spoke to The Atlantic about how US science and tech leadership was built on shared knowledge. When companies hoard research, innovation suffers and accountability declines.

My Slate piece on the widespread NEH grant cancellations is live. So much gratitude to everyone who took the time to talk with me these past few days while fighting fires on every side. #humanities #highered #neh slate.com/news-and-pol...

If you're searching for a postdoctoral position and you're interested in responsible AI, applied NLP, social data science, or social media, this is a great opportunity to start working with me!