CDS/Courant Prof @kempelab.bsky.social has recorded two talks with the Physics of Learning and Neural Computation, a Simons collaboration. She discussed how RL post-training shapes LLM reasoning but may hit ceilings like diversity collapse and low sample efficiency. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sbb...

CDS Assoc. Prof. Brian McFee shares words of wisdom for data science students. Advice: 👉 Keep an open mind 👉 Try different electives, and you never know, you might find a new direction. Applications to CDS' MS in data science are open through Feb 14: cds.nyu.edu/admissions/m...

Can paying public doctors more actually reduce the hours they work? Incoming CDS faculty Jaume Vives-i-Bastida co-authored a new paper showing that exclusivity bonuses in Spain caused a pure income effect that reduced overall labor supply. nyudatascience.medium.com/more-pay-les...

The February CDS #Research Feature has dropped 📧 Greg Durrett teaches language models to think, Jingtong Su and Jianyu Zhang reveal how a comma or a hashtag can upend AI leaderboards, and more on this month's feature! t.e2ma.net/webview/17vc...

The deadline for the Fall 2026 MS in Data Science is February 14. Check out our latest blog post for a recap of the admissions info session, including tips on prerequisites, the 36-credit curriculum, and advice from current students. nyudatascience.medium.com/the-cds-ms-p...

The Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, & Data Science is hiring for two tenure-track assistant professor positions starting Sept 2026. The School aims to expand ML/AI for science with a focus on the physical sciences. Apply by Feb 15: apply.interfolio.com/180888

CDS Silver Professor Julia Kempe (@kempelab.bsky.social) is co-organizing this year's ICLR 2026 Workshop on New Frontiers in Associative Memory. The workshop is accepting submissions related to associative memory until Feb 14. nfam2026.amemory.net

Verifiers are increasingly being used today in RL to provide rewards. We did a systematic study on when it is the best to use LLMs to verify solutions. Check out the blog post below to learn more.

Do stronger LLMs make better verifiers? Not necessarily when grading themselves. New work led by Courant PhD student @jacklu-me.bsky.social and CDS Asst Prof @mengyer.bsky.social shows that cross-family verification outperforms self-verification. nyudatascience.medium.com/study-reveal...

CDS seeks a new Chair to lead the Center’s expansion within the Courant Institute School. The incoming Chair will have a mandate to drive growth and oversee faculty recruitment. The deadline for full consideration is Feb 1. apply.interfolio.com/179190

CDS' Pascal Wallisch shares words of wisdom for data science students. Advice: ✅ Build a community ✅ Take advantage of the open environment ✅ Maintain a broad mindset with epistemic humility Applications to our MS in data science are open. Apply by Feb 14: cds.nyu.edu/admissions/m...

The U.S. once produced 88% of all remote sensing research. Today, it produces less than 9%, while China now produces nearly half of all global research in the field. nyudatascience.medium.com/china-now-do...

So excited that our paper got accepted to ICLR!! Check it out 👇

Can LLMs evolve human-like semantic categories? CDS-affiliated @nogazs.bsky.social and PhD student Nathaniel Imel show that, via simulated cultural transmission, LLMs reorganize color categories toward efficient compression. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2509.08093

Tuning AI models no longer needs to rely on expensive guesswork. Courant PhD student Nick Lourie, CDS Professor @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social, and CDS Assoc. Prof. He He reveal an important new statistical tool to estimate a model's best possible performance. nyudatascience.medium.com/taking-the-g...

The CDS Capstone Project course held its Final Poster Presentations at the Rosenthal Pavilion. 46 groups presented their work to mentors from NYU and industry. The course is a unique opportunity for students to solve real-world problems. Learn more: cds.nyu.edu/masters-in-d...

CDS PhD student Claudia Skok Gibbs shows that DNA sequence alone can construct powerful priors for gene network prediction — and that in GRN inference, prior quality matters more than which inference algorithm is chosen. nyudatascience.medium.com/what-dna-alo...

CDS graduate students gathered at Amity Hall Downtown for an end-of-year celebration. Attendees enjoyed drinks and light refreshments to mark the close of the semester.

New research on reward hacking — TRACE detects when reasoning models exploit shortcuts instead of doing the intended work. From CDS visiting academic Xinpeng Wang, Nitish Joshi, Barbara Plank, CDS Postdoc Researcher Rico Angell, & CDS Assoc. Prof. He He. nyudatascience.medium.com/catching-the...

Attention, MS Applicants! Still working on your application to the CDS MS program? Here’s a friendly reminder of what you need to get over the finish line:

CDS undergraduates presented original data science projects at the 2025 DSC Project Expo. Industry judges from CVS Aetna, Amazon, Goguma, and NYC Health + Hospitals evaluated the work.

A single character can reshuffle AI leaderboards. CDS PhD student Jingtong Su and CDS PhD alum Jianyu Zhang show that changing a delimiter in eval prompts can swing MMLU scores by up to 23 percent, enough to erase years of reported progress. nyudatascience.medium.com/a-comma-or-a...

MS students in CDS Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Eunsol Choi's (@eunsol.bsky.social) "Fundamentals of NLP" course presented final projects in an end-of-year poster session. Three projects won best poster:

Thanks to WiDS for organizing a crafty Holiday Chillout before finals. The event featured DIY snow globe crafting, free pasta, and hot chocolate in the CDS Open Space.

CDS alumni gathered at the end of the year for the annual Holiday Party. President of the CDS Alumni Council Elliot Silva announced the Alumni x CDS Hackathon, set for Saturday, March 28th, with Anand Tyagi as lead organizer.

CDS MS alumni report an average salary of $128,000, with recent grads working across tech, finance, education, consulting, and health — from Amazon and Meta to Morgan Stanley and NYU. nyudatascience.medium.com/by-the-numbe...

Principal Researcher Jordan Ash from Microsoft Research recently discussed improving sample efficiency at CDS's CILVR Seminar. Ash shared VeSSAL, a batch active learning algorithm, and explored how its principles can improve language model efficiency.

New year, new data science research! Julia Kempe’s new “soft” chain-of-thought training approach, Mengye Ren’s new “ARQ” learning algorithm, and more on this month’s research feature! t.e2ma.net/webview/tpc7...

Courant PhD student @zaynesprague.bsky.social, CDS Associate Professor @gregdnlp.bsky.social, CDS Assistant Professor @mengyer.bsky.social, and others propose a new method for teaching models to reason — even when they don’t start with reasoning skills. nyudatascience.medium.com/teaching-lan...

The full NYU Agentic AI Workshop video series is now available. CDS alum Adi Singhal led this four-session workshop covering the Model Context Protocol and how to build intelligent agents. 20+ videos on agentic AI, multi-agent systems, and more. 🔗 www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoTp...

CDS Associate Professor Brian McFee shares essential skills for data science grads in conversation with MS Admissions Ambassador Vidhi Manek.

Research from CDS Asst Prof @mengyer.bsky.social and Courant PhD student Christopher Hoang shows how the Midway Network learns object recognition and motion jointly from raw video, using motion latents and a gating unit to model real dynamics. nyudatascience.medium.com/watching-the...

CDS graduate students recently connected with Professor of Computer Science, Engineering and Data Science Juliana Freire over lunch. The intimate session brought together about a dozen MS and PhD students to connect with Freire outside the classroom.

CDS Clinical Professor Pascal Wallisch shares essential skills for data science grads in conversation with MS Admissions Ambassador Becca Rinehart. Gain the skills needed to succeed as a data scientist in our graduate programs. Apply now: cds.nyu.edu/ms-and-phd-a... Part 1 of 2

New work by CDS Faculty Fellow @shauli.bsky.social, CDS Assoc. Prof. @tallinzen.bsky.social, and CDS Prof. @joanbruna.bsky.social reveals how and why LLMs learn to encode truth as a physical direction in internal space — even without explicit labels. nyudatascience.medium.com/the-geometry...

CDS Prof. and Turing Award winner @yann-lecun.bsky.social will leave Meta at the end of the year, and is launching a startup focused on “world models”—AI systems that learn by observing and simulating physical environments. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/t...

CDS Interim Director and Associate Professor Carlos Fernandez-Granda shares essential skills for data science grads in conversation with MS Admissions Ambassador Vidhi Manek. Applications for our graduate programs are open! Apply now: cds.nyu.edu/ms-and-phd-a... 1/2

Women in Data Science held an Alumni Fireside Chat recently at CDS. Alumni shared career insights during a panel discussion, then current students connected with graduates in small groups for personalized advice on paths in data science and related fields.

Alumni Advice: Data Scientist Josh Torres graduated with a DS major in 2025 and now works at Antefixa. His advice? Go to class and do the work on time. It's much easier than letting it pile up.

🎤CDS grad students took the mic at GCBG Karaoke Night last Friday. 🎶 MS and PhD students gathered in the CDS Open Space for singing, Mediterranean food, and drinks—hosted by the Graduate Student Community Building Group.

CDS Assistant Professor @neurograce.bsky.social shares essential skills for data science grads in conversation with MS Admissions Ambassador Becca Rinehart. Gain the skills needed to succeed as a data scientist. Applications for our graduate programs are open: cds.nyu.edu/ms-and-phd-a...

CDS Prof @kempelab.bsky.social and collaborators show that soft-token training on chain of thought + hard-token inference yields better performance and robustness in LLM reasoning tasks. As @natashabutt.bsky.social put it: “Best to train soft, infer hard!” nyudatascience.medium.com/soft-tokens-...

Excited to share our new research on local RL without backprop!

Excited to share our new research on local RL without backprop!

Season's Greetings from CDS! We're inspired by our community's achievements this year, and we're celebrating becoming part of the new @nyucourant.bsky.social Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science. We wish you a season of warmth, happiness, and continued discovery.

CDS Prof. @yann-lecun.bsky.social has received the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, alongside Bengio, Hinton, Hopfield, Li, Huang & Dally, for work foundational to modern machine learning. qeprize.org/winners/mode...

Alumni Advice: Software Engineer Adi Singhal graduated in 2022 with a CS/DS major and now works on agentic AI at Amazon. His advice? Sit in the first row. Professors get to know you better, you ask more questions, and the cascading effects extend far beyond that single class.

PhD applications for Fall 2026 are due TODAY at 5pm EST! ⏰‼️ Apply Now: cds.nyu.edu/phd-admissio...

Welcoming new faculty to CDS! This fall, we welcomed Greg Durrett (@gregdnlp.bsky.social). In Fall 2026, we'll welcome Jaume Vives-i-Bastida, Zongyi Li, Juan Carlos Perdomo Silva, and Pratyusha Sharma.

CDS Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science @mengyer.bsky.social and co-author Frank Wu introduce ARQ, a new learning algorithm that skips backpropagation in favor of a more biologically plausible and computationally efficient method. nyudatascience.medium.com/ditching-bac...