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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

Myra Cheng @myra.bsky.social · 5d

AI always calling your ideas “fantastic” can feel inauthentic, but what are sycophancy’s deeper harms? We find that in the common use case of seeking AI advice on interpersonal situations—specifically conflicts—sycophancy makes people feel more right & less willing to apologize.

Screenshot of paper title: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence

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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

Abhilasha Ravichander @lasha.bsky.social · 7d

It is PhD application season again 🍂 For those looking to do a PhD in AI, these are some useful resources 🤖:

1. Examples of statements of purpose (SOPs) for computer science PhD programs: cs-sop.org [1/4]

CS PhD Statements of Purpose

cs-sop.org is a platform intended to help CS PhD applicants. It hosts a database of example statements of purpose (SoP) shared by previous applicants to Computer Science PhD programs.

cs-sop.org

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · 6d

I'll be at COLM next week! Let me know if you want to chat! @colmweb.org

@neilrathi.bsky.social will be presenting our work on multilingual overconfidence in language models and the effects on human overreliance!

arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06306

arxiv.org

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Aug 20

Congrats!!!

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Aug 14

Congrats!!! 🥳🤩

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Abhilasha Ravichander @lasha.bsky.social · Jul 22

📣 Life update: Thrilled to announce that I’ll be starting as faculty at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems this Fall!

I’ll be recruiting PhD students in the upcoming cycle, as well as research interns throughout the year: lasharavichander.github.io/contact.html

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EMNLP @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social · Jul 17

For EMNLP 2025’s special theme of "Advancing our Reach: Interdisciplinary Recontextualization of NLP", we are organizing a panel of experts, and would like input from the community at large as we prepare. Please take a moment to fill in this survey: forms.office.com/r/pWFFA0Gss1

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · Jun 25

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature

An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

ACM FAccT @facct.bsky.social · Jun 20

🏆 Announcing the #FAccT2025 best paper awards! 🏆

Congratulations to all the authors of the three best papers and three honorable mention papers.

Be sure to check out their presentations at the conference next week!

facct-blog.github.io/2025-06-20/b...

Announcing Best Paper Awards

The Best Paper Award Committee was chaired this year by Alex Chouldechova and included six Area Chairs. The committee selected three papers for the Best Paper Award and recognized three additional pap...

facct-blog.github.io

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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

Daniel Chechelnitsky @dchechel.bsky.social · Jun 17

What if AI played the role of your sassy gay bestie 🏳️‍🌈 or AAVE-speaking friend 👋🏾?

You: “Can you plan a trip?”
🤖 AI: “Yasss queen! let’s werk this babe✨💅”

LLMs can talk like us, but it shapes how we trust, rely on & relate to them 🧵

📣 our #FAccT2025 paper: bit.ly/3HJ6rWI

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Jun 16

We’re done!! Congratulations class of 2025!!! 🥳

@jurafsky.bsky.social @rewang.bsky.social

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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

Myra Cheng @myra.bsky.social · Jun 12

Do people actually like human-like LLMs? In our #ACL2025 paper HumT DumT, we find a kind of uncanny valley effect: users dislike LLM outputs that are *too human-like*. We thus develop methods to reduce human-likeness without sacrificing performance.

Screenshot of first page of the paper HumT DumT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs

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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · May 30

Here’s something we can all do: every time we see something about the Trump administration’s attacks on science — and the impacts of those attacks — boost it. People, and even faculty, have no idea how bad it is and how much worse it’s going to get. We need to let people know…

Ohio Capital Journal @ohiocapitaljournal.com · May 30

Commentary: It isn’t just the DEI or climate grants getting the axe from President Trump. Science agencies face up to 55% cuts across the board. This means Ohio students will be denied opportunities for cutting-edge careers given to previous generations buff.ly/rvom6rH

DOGE cuts to science will impact Ohio, students • Ohio Capital Journal

It isn’t just the DEI or climate-related grants getting the axe from President Trump. Science agencies face up to 55% cuts across the board, tens of billions of dollars. This means Ohio students will…

buff.ly

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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

Conference on Language Modeling @colmweb.org · May 27

Here are some graphs

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Vered Shwartz @veredshwartz.bsky.social · May 27

I guess that now that I have 1% of my Twitter followers follow me here 😅, I should announce it here too for those of you no longer checking Twitter: my nonfiction book, "Lost in Automatic Translation" is coming out this July: lostinautomatictranslation.com. I'm very excited to share it with you!

Book cover - Lost in Automatic Translation: Navigating Life in English in the Age of Language Technologies. By Vered Shwartz. Publisher: Cambridge University Press.

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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · May 20

Exciting news: The Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE) group at Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a predoctoral fellow!!! 🎉

www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

FATE Research Assistant (“Pre-doc”) - Microsoft Research

The Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) Research group at Microsoft Research New York City (MSR NYC) is looking for a pre-doctoral research assistant (pre-doc) to start August 20...

www.microsoft.com

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Apr 29

Work done with my wonderful collaborators @maartensap.bsky.social @jurafsky.bsky.social @nouhadziri.bsky.social and Xiang Ren and Jena Hwang!

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Apr 29

I will be presenting this work at an oral presentation in Ballroom B, Session H: Oral/Poster 5, Thursday May 1, 14:00-15:30!

Come say hi and hope to chat more about human-LLM interactions!

arxiv.org/pdf/2407.07950

arxiv.org

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Apr 29

Thrilled that our paper won 🏆 Best Paper Runner-Up 🏆 at #NAACL25!!

Our work (REL-A.I.) introduces an evaluation framework that measures human reliance on LLMs and reveals how contextual features like anthropomorphism, subject, and user history can significantly influence user reliance behaviors.

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Reposted by Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM

NAACL @naaclmeeting.bsky.social · Apr 25

🟢 Announcing the #NAACL2025 Award Winners!

The Best Paper and Best Theme Paper winners will present at our closing session

2025.naacl.org/blog/best-pa...

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Apr 24

Life update! Excited to announce that I’ll be starting as an assistant professor at Cornell Info Sci in August 2026! I’ll be recruiting students this upcoming cycle!

An abundance of thanks to all my mentors and friends who helped make this possible!!

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Chris Donahue @chrisdonahue.com · Mar 28

Thrilled to share that my *incoming* PhD student Yewon Kim’s work on multimodal inspiration in music AI has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at #CHI2025 🎉

Yewon really knocked it out of the park here. Can't wait to see what she does for her PhD!

arxiv.org/abs/2412.18940

Amuse: Human-AI Collaborative Songwriting with Multimodal Inspirations

Songwriting is often driven by multimodal inspirations, such as imagery, narratives, or existing music, yet songwriters remain unsupported by current music AI systems in incorporating these multimodal...

arxiv.org

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Kaitlyn Zhou @ COLM @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social · Mar 27

🤩 thanks Melanie!!

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The Atlantic @theatlantic.com · Mar 19

“The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research,” writes Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber. “Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully”:

Columbia’s Real Radical Threat Is From the Government

American universities have given the country prosperity and security. The Trump administration’s attack on academic freedom endangers all of that.

www.theatlantic.com

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Kelton Minor @keltonminor.bsky.social · Mar 18

There are days in life that shake you.

I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University
& academic career... 1/🧵

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