I gave talks at MIT and Harvard this week about "Science with synthetic data". How can generative models help us learn about the actual world (e.g., social systems) in a principled way? Lots of interesting conversations -- more convinced than ever that there's nuanced issues to navigate here.

💡Can we trust synthetic data for statistical inference? We show that synthetic data (e.g., LLM simulations) can significantly improve the performance of inference tasks. The key intuition lies in the interactions between the moment residuals of synthetic data and those of real data

Should LLMs be used to review papers? AAAI is piloting LLM-generated reviews this year. I wrote a blog post arguing that using LLMs as reviewers can have bad downstream consequences for science by centralizing judgments about what constitutes good research. bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev...

I'm recruiting PhD students for Fall 2025! CS PhD Deadline: Dec. 15th. I work on safe/reliable ML and causal inference, motivated by healthcare applications. Beyond myself, Johns Hopkins has a rich community of folks doing similar work. Come join us!