Padhraic Smyth's Avatar

Padhraic Smyth

@padhraicsmyth

ML researcher, teacher, professor, Dad, Irish, ...

284
Followers
142
Following
13
Posts
19.11.2024
Joined
Posts Following

Latest posts by Padhraic Smyth @padhraicsmyth

This is worth considering, but I'm skeptical. Nobody likes being criticized, and authors are likely to take it out on the criticizer. I expect that this will inflate the positivity of reviews. The "prestige" of being listed as a reviewer is currently so minimal that it's not worth the danger.

03.03.2026 20:25 πŸ‘ 15 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science Preprint repositories and conference organizers are having to counter a tide of β€˜AI slop’ submissions.

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science www.nature.com/articles/d41...

23.02.2026 08:54 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I was lucky to get a sneak preview of Advait’s talk and it is SO GOOD. I wish everyone building AI would watch this.

13.11.2025 17:57 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

The problem is us, with our Paleolithic vulnerabilities, our FOMO, our susceptibility to snake oil salesmen and the ELIZA effect. Say no to anthropomorphized tech solutionism and yes to stronger human institutions, fortified by ordinary technology. (11/11)

12.11.2025 10:09 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Opinion | Why Even Basic A.I. Use Is So Bad for Students

β€œTo leave our students to their own devices β€” which is to say, to the devices of AI companies β€” is to deprive them of...the means to understand the world they live in or navigate it effectively,” Anastasia Berg writes. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o...

31.10.2025 18:14 πŸ‘ 9 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

Well done to everyone involved behind the scenes at WiML over the past 20 years - its been a very positive influence in the ML research community!

03.11.2025 22:08 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I cannot wait to celebrate TWENTY YEARS of #WiML at #NeurIPS in San Diego this December! πŸŽ‰πŸ₯³

Fun fact: The first #WiML was held in San Diego back in 2006! ❀️

Share your memories below, and come hang out on Dec 2! I will be there! I will be speaking! And have I mentioned I AM EXCITED?!?!?!

31.10.2025 21:09 πŸ‘ 21 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Pietro Perona's Vision: Visipedia and Its Lasting Impact on Computer Vision The machine learning-driven system for identifying visual information has grown the citizen-science apps Merlin and iNaturalist, led to the development of key datasets, and jump-started the field of i...

Nice writeup in @caltech.edu news about the impact of the #Visipedia project in Computer Vision and Citizen Science

24.10.2025 21:48 πŸ‘ 8 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Inspiring article .... this work has had fantastic impact. I remember Pietro trying to convince me in the 1990s at some point that machine learning could revolutionize computer vision.....it seemed a very long way off at the time...glad that he and you and many others persisted :)

25.10.2025 00:49 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Not being an AI-doomer, but having experienced in my own department over the past 7 years a steady erosion of faculty governance norms and diminished prioritization of research-oriented pedagogy, this tracks. Let faculty and faculty interests lead the way, rather than administrators/regents

24.10.2025 15:33 πŸ‘ 15 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

We (UC Irvine) are hiring for a faculty position (any level) in AI/ML/vision/NLP/etc. If you would like to work in a great department with great colleagues please apply! and please distribute to students, researchers, faculty who may be interested. More info here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ZyY5...

15.09.2025 16:20 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Speech and Language Processing Speech and Language Processing

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

24.08.2025 19:28 πŸ‘ 150 πŸ” 59 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 4

Florida taken over by rabid frequentists?

15.08.2025 15:35 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

πŸ“£ Please share: We invite submissions to the 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (#AISTATS 2026) and welcome paper submissions at the intersection of AI, machine learning, statistics, and related areas. [1/3]

12.08.2025 11:46 πŸ‘ 36 πŸ” 21 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 2

Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.

05.08.2025 16:46 πŸ‘ 2562 πŸ” 918 πŸ’¬ 31 πŸ“Œ 25
Preview
Foundations of Computer Vision The print version was published by

Our computer vision textbook is now available for free online here:
visionbook.mit.edu

We are working on adding some interactive components like search and (beta) integration with LLMs.

Hope this is useful and feel free to submit Github issues to help us improve the text!

15.06.2025 15:45 πŸ‘ 117 πŸ” 32 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 1

I've heard this personally from multiple PMs at AI companies. Students are one of the biggest demographics and they need to "break in" and have even more usage to improve their metrics. Classic corporate economic incentives

09.06.2025 15:24 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

This Senate proposal advanced by Sen Cruz would cancel new and existing State laws on any aspect of tech use including civil rights, consumer protection, privacy, fraud, safety for kids, accessibility, and more. In short, we’d lose the few laws we have that ensure responsible AI use. #killthebill

06.06.2025 04:29 πŸ‘ 663 πŸ” 393 πŸ’¬ 19 πŸ“Œ 21
Post image

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

23.05.2025 16:21 πŸ‘ 119 πŸ” 30 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 2
Preview
Extracting memorized pieces of (copyrighted) books from open-weight language models Plaintiffs and defendants in copyright lawsuits over generative AI often make sweeping, opposing claims about the extent to which large language models (LLMs) have memorized plaintiffs' protected expr...

Llama 3.1 70B contains copies of nearly the entirety of some books. Harry Potter is just one of them. I don’t know if this means it’s an infringing copy. But the first question to answer is if it’s a copy at all/in the first place. That’s what our new results suggest:

arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546

21.05.2025 11:20 πŸ‘ 53 πŸ” 24 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 4

A call for scientists to stand up for scientific freedom as well as funding: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

14.05.2025 01:36 πŸ‘ 13 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

@candicemorey.bsky.social and I were just talking about this. Students, I think, are still (rightly) nervous about submitting LLM-produced work, but they are using it to summarise papers they struggle to read. And it shows in their subsequent writing. It's "just reading the abstracts", but worse.

13.05.2025 07:16 πŸ‘ 35 πŸ” 15 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

Because we must build good things while we scream about the bad, I have started a "Data for Good" team @data-for-good-team.bsky.social that partners with organizations needing short-term data science help. We have three projects ongoing & will add more as our capacity grows.
data-for-good-team.org

10.05.2025 15:33 πŸ‘ 152 πŸ” 68 πŸ’¬ 8 πŸ“Œ 1
Preview
Turing Award winners warn over unsafe deployment of AI models Two pioneers of reinforcement learning have won the $1mn prize from the Association for Computing Machinery

Congratulations to Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto on receiving the Turing Award in recognition of their significant contributions to ML. I also stand with them: Releasing models to the public without the right technical and societal safeguards is irresponsible.
www.ft.com/content/d8f8...

05.03.2025 13:43 πŸ‘ 117 πŸ” 24 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 6
Post image

My new paper "Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different": arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113. Generalization behaviours in deep learning can be intuitively understood through a notion of soft inductive biases, and formally characterized with countable hypothesis bounds! 1/12

05.03.2025 15:37 πŸ‘ 210 πŸ” 49 πŸ’¬ 6 πŸ“Œ 9
Post image

There are a bunch of published papers referencing β€œvegetative electron microscopy” because of Generative AI retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/v...

22.02.2025 01:47 πŸ‘ 37 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 3
Post image Post image

I'm very excited to share notes on Probabilistic AI that I have been writing with @arkrause.bsky.social πŸ₯³

arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05244

These notes aim to give a graduate-level introduction to probabilistic ML + sequential decision-making.
I'm super glad to be able to share them with all of you now!

11.02.2025 08:19 πŸ‘ 120 πŸ” 25 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 3
Preview
Machine Learning 101? Imagining a new syllabus for a first course on machine learning.

What should we teach our undergrads about machine learning? I wrote up some ideas for restructuring Machine Learning 101.

13.02.2025 15:39 πŸ‘ 37 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1

1/8. This week I had a few different conversations with scholars who, in the face of the attacks on science and institutions of learning in the U.S., are wondering what to do. One suggestion I have is: keep doing your work. It matters in and of itself. Why do I say that? A few reasons.

08.02.2025 20:42 πŸ‘ 1104 πŸ” 400 πŸ’¬ 15 πŸ“Œ 43

Microsoft's own research confirms something that was already pretty obvious: relying on a text generating machine to come up with answers erodes critical thinking, and is a method favoured by those who never liked doing critical thinking in the first place

advait.org/files/lee_20...

09.02.2025 10:15 πŸ‘ 7544 πŸ” 2542 πŸ’¬ 137 πŸ“Œ 297