Deadline extended! Get your direct submissions in by March 8 AoE
03.03.2026 18:16
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Deadline extended! Get your direct submissions in by March 8 AoE
Hiring a postdoc for the Normativity Lab at Johns Hopkins (2026 start). Looking for multiagent systems expertise (RL/generative agents) + interdisciplinary background in AI and cognitive science/econ/cultural evolution.
apply.interfolio.com/177701
I think in part they set it up because people were putting patient data directly into ChatGPT 😭. But JHU is insanely careful with patient data, I can't imagine they'd approve it with very strong contracts. They already use Microsoft products for hospital data so I imagine this was not that different
We also have a version, and surprisingly JHU hospital has approved it for use with patient data. My unverified understanding is it's actually OpenAI models hosted on Azure, so the trusted party here is Microsoft (though we also have a direct OpenAI version ok for FERPA and not ok HIPAA data)
After a multi-year effort led by my brilliant PhD advisee Ruth Bagley, this exciting work documenting large-scale racial disparities in media representations of gun violence is out today in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
The next edition of the NLP+CSS will be at ACL 2026! It includes an open-ended shared task (work with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive) with travel grants as prizes!
For the last decade, the pervasive spread of bullshit & manipulation of online platforms have been widely recognized societal concerns. Now non US citizens studying those subjects can be labeled “censors” & denied visas or deported from the US. Censorship, indeed. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...
Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field experiment with 1256 participants on X during the 2024 US presidential campaign. Our experiment used a large language model to rerank posts that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Decreasing or increasing AAPA exposure shifted out-party partisan animosity by more than 2 points on a 100-point feeling thermometer, with no detectable differences across party lines, providing causal evidence that exposure to AAPA content alters affective polarization. This work establishes a method to study feed algorithms without requiring platform cooperation, enabling independent evaluation of ranking interventions in naturalistic settings.
New paper in Science:
In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization.
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Led by @stolenpyjak.bsky.social, we built a user-friendly python package for generating and evaluating privacy-preserving synthetic data! See details in our EMNLP Demo paper:
Considering a PhD in NLP/Speech? 🤔
Need guidance with your application materials?
@jhuclsp is offering a student-run application mentoring program for prospective applicants from underrepresented backgrounds.
📝 Learn more & apply: forms.gle/PMWByc6J3vD...
📅 Deadline: Nov 20
check out our new EMNLP paper on privacy-preserving synthetic data generation - excellent work by PhD student @zihaozhao.bsky.social !
There is time to urge a change to the current #GRFP solicitation ( #NSF 25-547 ): reverse the eligibility restrictions and ensure applicants (including 2nd year PhD students) have a fair chance in the competition.
Feel free to sign and share this open petition:
laurenkuehne.github.io/grfpChanges/
This was a super fun NLP+HCI project that started as a summer workshop with undergrad researchers (co-first authors Alina Hyk and Kiera McCormick)! It mostly involved chatting with astronomers, including wonderful co-authors @jwuphysics.bsky.social, @errai34.bsky.social, and others!
Figure showing overview of paper. On the left, user's slack messages and responses from the RAG bot. On the right, the messages are analyzed through inductive coding and user interviews
Our COLM preprint is up! arxiv.org/abs/2507.15715
tldr: we deployed a RAG slack bot and invited astronomers to use it. Through analyzing their usage and conducting follow-up interviews, we recommend better ways to build benchmarks for evaluating AI for astronomy (or science more generally)
They are on the 2025 website, and they are the same as last year: www.icwsm.org/2025/submit/...
I'm super excited to welcome these amazing colleagues!
This framing is all wrong
Our international students are not a “crucial funding source”
They are our STUDENTS
They are the reason we EXIST
We teach STUDENTS
Someone told me they used embedding debiasing methods in information retrieval settings, where the embeddings are being used directly with the same sorts of operations (e.g. cosine similarity) that debiasing methods target. But that one anecdote is all I've got
Thanks for this nice summary of our recent EMNLP paper! Work with @smfsamir.bsky.social and others at @tsvetshop.bsky.social
😂 I had to check this, I think @mdredze.bsky.social beat me by a few months
I'm super excited about this program and happy to connect if you're interested in working with me through it!
I'm here and will start trying to be more active!
📣 Call for #ICWSM2024 workshop proposals!
icwsm.org/2024/index.h...
All web + social media topics are welcome! Especially emerging approaches and task areas, bridging gaps between the social sciences and computing, and elucidating results of exploratory research.
Due Jan. 12!