pro-tip for anyone who ever visits: the most elite meal you can get in charlottesville is half a chicken, cilantro rice and charro beans from al carbon

"those who relate to others as though they are not worthy of respect ought to be treated with the regard that orientation deserves"

The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

Honored to be promoted to Associate Professor at the University of Washington! Grateful to my brilliant mentees, students, collaborators, mentors & @techpolicylab.bsky.social for advancing research in AI & Ethics together—and for the invaluable academic freedom to keep shaping trustworthy AI.

Find out all about the University of Washington’s Department of Sociology & other soc depts in the 2025 ASA Guide to Graduate Depts of Sociology. Now completely online & free for ASA members. Available for a fee to nonmembers. https://bit.ly/ASAGradGuide

Thus the impostor syndrome remains alive and well nourished 🙃

🎉🎊A week full of celebrations ✨Two ERC Starting Grants for the MPIDR✨ We are thrilled to announce that @marilianep.bsky.social and @ugobas.bsky.social have each been awarded with an ERC Starting Grant by the @erc.europa.eu. #ERCStG www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_even... #ERCStartingGrant #longevity

Everyone talks about how hard the dark Seattle winter is, but I am always more unsettled by what happens in September. Approaching the peak rate-of-diminishing-sunlight season 🫠 (image inspired by @neilrkaye.bsky.social)

When reading AI reasoning text (aka CoT), we (humans) form a narrative about the underlying computation process, which we take as a transparent explanation of model behavior. But what if our narratives are wrong? We measure that and find it usually is. Now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2508.16599

academic collaborations are so great for many reasons. in particular, i love frantically co-editing the same manuscript in real time with my buds.

I spoke to Forbes about why model "welfare" is a silly framing to an important issue; models don't have feelings, and it's a big distraction from real questions like tensions between safety vs. user utility, which are NLP/HCI/policy questions www.forbes.com/sites/victor...

“I have no intention of being bullied to step down from my position because of some questions raised in a tweet,” Cook said. www.bloomberg.com/news/article... Amen.

Pup on a pip? Try out these KPIs for maximizing pet utility at home

Three hundred days grace

computational social science friends, what are some of your favorite papers the use unsupervised topic modeling in their analyses?

Back in Palo Alto for week two of SICSS-Stanford. Really excited for this workshop on LLMs and PPI with Tijana and @gligoric.bsky.social !!

Awesome first ASA experience at #ASA2025! Really thoughtful engagement and helpful feedback on my work. What a fantastic community :)

Hello from #ASA25! So excited to have so many lovely sociologists in my city! Welcome 🤗

Hayley Williams, thank you for this new music!

Big congratulations to @larabister.bsky.social, alumna of the EDSD and IMPRS-PHDS programs, on winning first prize in the Social Sciences section of the Körber Foundation's German Thesis Award for her doctoral thesis on economic crises and health! Details: www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_even...

I’m delighted to share that the August 2025 special issue of Sociological Methods & Research on Generative AI is out now. Along with my co-editor, Daniel Karell, we put together this issue to build on the conference we organized last year. Here's a thread on each of the ten papers:

This issue of the Annual Review of Sociology is open access! That means my article with Devin Collins and Fran Gomez Baeza on the history of finance is free. Check it out if really really old financial markets (or even sort of old financial markets) is your thing.

This is such a great paper and really helps to emphasize how data under specification in ML systems bias our understanding and decision making. Especially in inequitable resource scarce settings. Thanks for sharing @emmharv.bsky.social !

Microwave popcorn has a 3-second window between “not yet” and “you’ve summoned smoke spirits who hate you personally.”

Talking about this work tomorrow (Wed, July 23rd) at #IC2S2 in Norrköping during the 11 am session on LLMs, Annotation, and Synthetic Data! Come hear about this and more!

Only listening to Paramore today

Using gen AI to do peer reviews for you is unethical. Trying to game peer review with hidden AI prompts is also unethical. And putting papers on arxiv that still have those prompts embedded is also just incredibly stupid. Uuuuuugh. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/t...

Agreed. I am far more concerned about reviewers using AI shortcuts than authors prompt injecting tbh

Okay I’ve been offline this week writing about processes of social construction, what’d I miss?

Establishment politician nightmare fuel

Professor @dem8z.bsky.social speaking on the steps of the Rotunda yesterday in protest of the authoritarian takeover of higher education.

Learned so much this week doing this course! Highly recommend it!Completed the week with this plot version from my project about Shared Lifetime in 1950 and 2023

Many people are saying!

With democrats like these, who even needs republicans? Military strikes against a sovereign nation is war. That it is waged unconstitutionally does not make it something different. Helloo?

I had the privilege of teaching an impressive group of early career scholars at @mpidr.bsky.social this week. What an amazing time to be in Rostock! Happy I could open up the big-tent of geography to a few more researchers

We're happy to have you here! And also, we hope you enjoy the view and the finally arrived summer.

Does space matter? This week we are hosting an IMPRS-PHDS elective course on GIS and spatial analysis, led by our experts Stefan Leyk and @alekberg.bsky.social and attended by PHDS researchers and guests. We wish everyone a productive and exciting week of study!

Crying in Data Mart

Not being the first author on a collaboration means the work is submitted while I’m out enjoying a run. Is this productivity?

Good news out of Seattle, where the Link light rail registered its highest-ever ridership in May as the 2-line got extended to Downtown Redmond. Ridership is up more than 20% compared to last May!

Hell of a photo

New paper in PNAS! With @phuang.bsky.social and Carter Butts. This paper highlights an overlooked mechanism, when multiple infectious individuals compete to infect the same susceptible person, the disease can reduce its own effective reproductive rate. #articles www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I’m thrilled to share RewardBench 2 📊— We created a new multi-domain reward model evaluation that is substantially harder than RewardBench, we trained and released 70 reward models, and we gained insights about reward modeling benchmarks and downstream performance!

"Tell, Don't Show" was accepted to #ACL2025 Findings! 

 Our conceptually intuitive, lightweight approach for literary topic modeling combines the new (language models) with the old (classic LDA) to yield better topics. ✨📚 arxiv.org/abs/2505.23166

This approach to “LLMs for topic modeling” makes a lot of sense to me. Use the LLM to transform the original texts, then use a traditional topic model to cluster.

Just received my letter of recognition for completing a concentration in Social Statistics alongside these fantastic peers! I am so grateful for this wonderful community on campus!

nothing like the rush of a hard deadline for an article submission 💀

It’s totally normal to get rejected from most professional applications. College, publications, jobs, etc. Speaking for myself - I mostly never hear back, or get an automated rejection. Anyway, I just received a constructive, personalized rejection, and it feels so nice. Still reject, but validating

Faculty at the University of Washington, please sign, and please help us spread the word! Link the letter is below.

Slightly paraphrasing @oms279.bsky.social during his talk at #COMPTEXT2025: "The single most important use case for LLMs in sociology is turning unstructured data into structured data." Discussing his recent work on codebooks, prompts, and information extraction: osf.io/preprints/so...