Nikhil Garg
nkgarg.bsky.social
Nikhil Garg
@nkgarg.bsky.social
I study algorithms/learning/data applied to democracy/markets/society. Asst. professor at Cornell Tech. https://gargnikhil.com/. Helping building personalized Bluesky research feed: https://bsky.app/profile/paper-feed.bsky.social/feed/preprintdigest
Pinned
*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
ACM members/computing researchers who should be members interested in contributing should join the subcommittee's mailing list!

One of our goals here is to build policy coalitions across institutions so we can do more as a collective 💪 and balance special interest groups.
November 25, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
Many people don't know this but arXiv is maintained and operated by @cornelltech.bsky.social (that does NOT mean you can send me complaints or feature requests!)

Everyone in the community should be excited that arXiv got $7M to upgrade from Schmidt Sciences, NASA

news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...
$7M grant from NASA, Schmidt Sciences to upgrade arXiv | Cornell Chronicle
The funding will help arXiv – which is maintained and operated by Cornell Tech – finish migrating to cloud infrastructure and modernizing its code.
news.cornell.edu
November 24, 2025 at 9:32 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
Trying to think of something serious to say about the “cryptographers lose the key for the cryptographer election” story and, mostly, hey: I just love that cryptographers are actually using the weird cryptography! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...
Cryptographers Held an Election. They Can’t Decrypt the Results.
www.nytimes.com
November 22, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Interesting paper AND discussion by Proflic folks in the comments
new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
November 19, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
📣 Postdocs at Yale FDS! 📣 Tremendous freedom to work on data science problems with faculty across campus, multi-year, great salary. Deadline 12/15. Spread the word! Application: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31114 More about Yale FDS: fds.yale.edu
Yale University, Institute for the Foundations of Data Science
Job #AJO31114, Postdoc in Foundations of Data Science, Institute for the Foundations of Data Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, US
academicjobsonline.org
November 18, 2025 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
How should Mayor Mamdani make #govtech work for all New Yorkers?

@beta.nyc is presenting 8 actionable #CivicTech ideas for the incoming administration. Also, we have gathered community recommendations at the bottom of our ideas.

Read more on here.

www.beta.nyc/2025/11/18/d...
Dear Mayor-Elect Mamdani, here are 8 gov tech ideas for your first 100 days. - BetaNYC
Dear Mayor-Elect Mamdani, here are 8 gov tech ideas for your first 100 days!
www.beta.nyc
November 18, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
Had a great time at CODE@MIT this weekend, and wanted to highlight a few (of the many) cool talks!
November 18, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
back again to share a new preprint from me and @mantzarlis.com! “What did Elon Change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia” arxiv.org/abs/2511.09685

I had seen many spot analyses of individual grokipedia pages, but I was curious: how was grokipedia made? what did Elon change from wikipedia?
November 17, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
For #30DayMapChallenge day 11, a minimal map from @kennypeng.bsky.social.

Kenny extracts minimal elements from a not-as-minimal-as-it-seems object: the Manhattan street grid. "I show how Manhattan’s numbered grid of streets and avenues is more complicated than you might realize," he says.
November 17, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
It's been an absolute pleasure working with Ellen, Madeleine, and their amazing PhD students for the past year on making optimization more accessible with generative AI!

I am on the job market this year - check out my website (conlaw.github.io) for more details on what I've been up to.
November 16, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
Like what you're seeing? This feed runs on @graze.social, where the feeds you love come to life - pitch in below to support the team and keep the lights on!
Graze Social Tip Jar
Donate to the Graze Social team and keep the feeds flowing!
buy.stripe.com
November 15, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
🚨Out in PNAS🚨
Examining news on 7 platforms:
1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news
2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning
3)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
November 14, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
Common Ground between AI 2027 & AI as Normal Technology asteriskmag.substack.com/p/common-groun… (interesting) #AI #future
November 13, 2025 at 11:29 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
I can't think of a better resource today for those looking to learn about and/or break into civic tech than @kdyz.bsky.social's #PublicSectorJobBoard. I can't imagine it's at all a small lift—thank you Rebecca!

publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/october-28...
October 28, 2025 - Public Sector Job Board
The 73rd edition. Your source of tech and innovation jobs in government.
publicsectorjobboard.substack.com
October 31, 2025 at 3:57 AM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
🚨Calling all education+social science researchers! 🚨

For the second time ever, Common App is hosting an open Call for Research Proposals to solicit innovative and rigorous research projects using our expansive (& still mostly untapped) data warehouse!
www.commonapp.org/files/DAR/Co...
November 10, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
We are slowly catching up to the #30DayMapChallenge!

In our day 3: polygons submission, @zhixuanqi.bsky.social questioned the boundaries and fuzziness of polygons with an animated map that invites us to think about the (not-so-well-defined) idea of neighborhoods.
November 7, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
So many nonsense ad hoc pipelines could be prevented by requiring that they work on synthetic data.

I tend to think of experiments as special cases of inference, since most of the problems I work on cannot be studied in experiments. But I get that many researchers see experiments as base analogy.
"Validate With Simulated Truth: A first habit is to test whether an analytical pipeline can recover known conditions."

Very good advice below. So much COVID nonsense (e.g. 'immunological dark matter') basically came down to a non-identifiable model that hadn't been properly tested.
Modelling Like an Experimentalist
Dahlin et al. (2024) apply experimental thinking to a model of mosquito-borne disease transmissions.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
November 10, 2025 at 12:41 PM
This was one of my favorite conferences last year
November 9, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Have been waiting for this paper to come out ever since Hongyao told me about it -- more academics should be taking advantage of such open data to answer important questions
Coverage of the paper by @ellebeyoud.bsky.social of Bloomberg here (gift link):

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
November 7, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
🧠⚙️ Interested in decision theory+cogsci meets AI? Want to create methods for rigorously designing & evaluating human-AI workflows?

I'm recruiting PhDs to work on:
🎯 Stat foundations of multi-agent collaboration
🌫️ Model uncertainty & meta-cognition
🔎 Interpretability
💬 LLMs in behavioral science
November 5, 2025 at 4:40 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
I’m recruiting students this upcoming cycle at UIUC! I’m excited about Qs on societal impact of AI, especially human-AI collaboration, multi-agent interactions, incentives in data sharing, and AI policy/regulation (all from both a theoretical and applied lens). Apply through CS & select my name!
November 6, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
Excellent report on experiences of @guidoimbens.bsky.social & Mary Wootters co-teaching "Causality, Decision Making, and Data Science" to undergrads at Stanford fall 2024: hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/uynpjlow... Course material here: stanford-causal-inference-class.github.io
November 3, 2025 at 4:14 PM
The @stechlab-labels.bsky.social labeler is indeed very useful to weed out who to follow
dame.is dame @dame.is · 25d
seriously the @stechlab-labels.bsky.social labeler is hella cool, some really interesting data that they’re processing and flagging
October 30, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Fully funded AI postdocs at Cornell (Tech or Ithaca). Can work with faculty across wide range of departments.
Cornell (NYC and Ithaca) is recruiting AI postdocs, apply by Nov 20, 2025! If you're interested in working with me on technical approaches to responsible AI (e.g., personalization, fairness), please email me.

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971
Cornell University, Empire AI Fellows Program
Job #AJO30971, Postdoctoral Fellow, Empire AI Fellows Program, Cornell University, New York, New York, US
academicjobsonline.org
October 28, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Reposted by Nikhil Garg
Through some recent projects about social services/admin burden/exploring impacts of targeted outreach I've learned a lot about how great of a program SNAP is! Really everyone wins

Slides on from a talk yesterday on optimal encouragement designs/auditing: drive.google.com/file/d/1iZYb...
talk-informs-encouragements.pdf
drive.google.com
October 27, 2025 at 7:52 PM