Aaron Schein
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aaronschein.bsky.social
Aaron Schein
@aaronschein.bsky.social
1.5K followers 380 following 64 posts
Assistant Professor of Statistics & Data Science at UChicago

Topics: data-intensive social science, Bayesian statistics, causal inference, probabilistic ML

Proud “golden retriever” 🦮
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Reposted by Aaron Schein
dallascard.bsky.social
I am delighted to share our new #PNAS paper, with @grvkamath.bsky.social @msonderegger.bsky.social and @sivareddyg.bsky.social, on whether age matters for the adoption of new meanings. That is, as words change meaning, does the rate of adoption vary across generations? www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....
July 29, 2025 at 12:31 PM
aaronschein.bsky.social
Southwest Airlines appears to have rewritten the synopses of its inflight entertainment using AI. The Chinese vice-premier isn’t even a character in this movie!
July 20, 2025 at 7:35 PM
aaronschein.bsky.social
Before gesturing to the good ol' days when industry didn't suck up our greatest minds, consider this article I just came across in a 1929 issue of JASA which found that 70% of statisticians had "no other [scientific] affiliation [...] possibly because of [their interest] in business enterprises".
June 12, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
gershbrain.bsky.social
I'd like to see a revival of panache and artistry in scientific prose style. Since we have to read so many papers, they should be fun and beautiful. I would also argue that this serves the goal of communication: readers will be more likely to remember a striking phrase or image.
March 31, 2025 at 11:07 AM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
nkgarg.bsky.social
Now online @pnasnexus.org! Many discrimination auditing and electoral tasks use ML to predict race/ethnicity – by discretizing continuous scores. Can the discretization process cause bias in labels and downstream tasks? Yes! Led by @evandyx.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
Paper screenshot. Title: Addressing discretization-induced bias in demographic prediction Abstract: Racial and other demographic imputation is necessary for many applications, especially in auditing disparities and outreach targeting in political campaigns. The canonical approach is to construct continuous predictions—e.g. based on name and geography—and then to often discretize the predictions by selecting the most likely class (argmax), potentially with a minimum threshold (thresholding). We study how this practice produces discretization bias. For example, we show that argmax labeling, as used by a prominent commercial voter file vendor to impute race/ethnicity, results in a substantial under-count of Black voters, e.g. by 28.2% points in North Carolina. This bias can have substantial implications in downstream tasks that use such labels. We then introduce a joint optimization approach—and a tractable data-driven threshold heuristic—that can eliminate this bias, with negligible individual-level accuracy loss. Finally, we theoretically analyze discretization bias, show that calibrated continuous models are insufficient to eliminate it, and that an approach such as ours is necessary. Broadly, we warn researchers and practitioners against discretizing continuous demographic predictions without considering downstream consequences.
February 27, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
jmendelsohn2.bsky.social
New preprint!
Metaphors shape how people understand politics, but measuring them (& their real-world effects) is hard.

We develop a new method to measure metaphor & use it to study dehumanizing metaphor in 400K immigration tweets Link: bit.ly/4i3PGm3

#NLP #NLProc #polisky #polcom #compsocialsci
🐦🐦
Screenshot of top half of first page of paper. The paper is titled: "When People are Floods: Analyzing Dehumanizing Metaphors in Immigration Discourse with Large Language Models". The authors are Julia Mendelsohn (University of Chicago) and Ceren Budak (University of Michigan). The top right corner contains a visual showing the sentence "They want immigrants to pour into and infest this country". The caption says: Figure 1: Dehumanizing sentence likening immigrants to the source domain concepts of Water and Vermin via the words "pour" and "infest". The abstract text on the left reads: Metaphor, discussing one concept in terms of another, is abundant in politics and can shape how people understand important issues. We develop a computational approach to measure metaphorical language, focusing on immigration discourse on social media. Grounded in qualitative social science research, we identify seven concepts evoked in immigration discourse (e.g. "water" or "vermin"). We propose and evaluate a novel technique that leverages both word-level and document-level signals to measure metaphor with respect to these concepts. We then study the relationship between metaphor, political ideology, and user engagement in 400K US tweets about immigration. While conservatives tend to use dehumanizing metaphors more than liberals, this effect varies widely across concepts. Moreover, creature-related metaphor is associated with more retweets, especially for liberal authors. Our work highlights the potential for computational methods to complement qualitative approaches in understanding subtle and implicit language in political discourse.
February 20, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
jeremykoster.bsky.social
Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)
February 19, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
owasow.bsky.social
New study looks at Vietnam Draft Lotteries to test effects of “interracial contact on racial attitudes.” Finds “white men who were selected for the draft subsequently expressed less negative attitudes toward Black people and toward policies designed to help them.” www.cambridge.org/core/service...
Title and Abstract from article in the American Political Science Review. Title: The Vietnam Draft Lottery and Whites’ Racial Attitudes: Evidence from the General Social Survey by DONALD P. GREEN Columbia University, and OLIVER HYMAN-METZGER Columbia University Abstract: The Vietnam Draft Lotteries, which randomly assigned men to military service, enable researchers to assess the long-term effects of interracial contact on racial attitudes. Using a new draft status indicator for respondents to the General Social Surveys 1978–2021, we show that white men who were selected for the draft subsequently expressed less negative attitudes toward Black people and toward policies designed to help them. These effects are apparent only for cohorts that were actually drafted into service, suggesting that interracial contact during military service led to attitude change. These findings have important implications for theories of political socialization and prejudice reduction.
December 20, 2024 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
anastoica.bsky.social
Come check out our posters at @neuripsconf.bsky.social this week!

Excited about two new works on optimization x fairness, read more below ⬇️

I won’t be there, but my co-authors will :)
December 9, 2024 at 8:21 PM
aaronschein.bsky.social
Calling all polarization researchers…

“While messaging Android to Android or iPhone to iPhone is secure, messaging from one to the other is not.”

www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...
FBI Warns iPhone And Android Users—Stop Sending Texts
US officials urge citizens to use encrypted messaging and calls wherever they can—here’s what you need to know.
www.forbes.com
December 6, 2024 at 3:34 AM
aaronschein.bsky.social
Been a while since I made dinosaur sourdough #breadsky
December 5, 2024 at 10:28 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
keyonv.bsky.social
hi
December 4, 2024 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
keyonv.bsky.social
Thank you Nature and @anilananth.bsky.social for this great feature on LLMs and AGI (and for highlighting our work arxiv.org/abs/2406.03689)
December 4, 2024 at 4:59 PM
aaronschein.bsky.social
Happy holidays to all who celebrate “NeurIPS Update Your Timezone”
An automated email that goes out every year from the machine learning conference NeurIPS, advising registrants to update their timezone on the conference website.
December 2, 2024 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
dsi-uchicago.bsky.social
Save the Date!

It is our pleasure to share that the 2025 Midwest ML Symposium will be held at the University of Chicago, June 23-24, 2025!

Please stay tuned for further information about registration, accommodation, and transportation on the conference website midwest-ml.org/2025/
November 27, 2024 at 2:58 PM
aaronschein.bsky.social
Starter packs say “Join the conversation” but then they’re just lists of profiles. Or am I missing something? Are there conversations to join?
November 24, 2024 at 3:24 AM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
roydanroy.bsky.social
For those who don’t feel like they fit into my Grumpy Machine Learners list (which I still need to update based on 100+ requests) I’ve created another starter pack:

go.bsky.app/Js7ka12

(Self) nominations welcome.
November 22, 2024 at 6:40 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
emmapierson.bsky.social
Hello...world?

Trying to reconstruct my academic networks over here :) Follow me if we know each other or if you're interested in machine learning for healthcare/social equity! Please retweet, or resky, or whatever they call it over here.
November 23, 2024 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
robinryder.bsky.social
Bayesians!
Are you a member of ISBA? Are you into applications in the Social Sciences?

We are starting a new ISBA section on Bayesian Social Sciences. This requires a petition, signed by at least 30 ISBA members. You can add your name here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Petition to form a Bayesian Social Sciences section at ISBA
Petition to form a Bayesian Social Sciences section at ISBA The following members of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) wish to petition the ISBA board to be recognized as the IS...
docs.google.com
November 21, 2024 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
uchicagomag.bsky.social
First snow
November 21, 2024 at 6:21 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
jay.bsky.team
6. Custom feeds on Bluesky are the first implementation of algorithmic choice. Instead of using a single black-box For You algorithm, you can create and subscribe to your own.

Now, there are over 50k+ custom feeds on the network! Check them out:

bsky.app/feeds
November 19, 2024 at 6:52 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
mariaa.bsky.social
I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work with me at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for creative students with interests in #NLP and #CulturalAnalytics.

Boulder is a lovely college town 30 minutes from Denver and 1 hour from Rocky Mountain National Park 😎

Apply by December 15th!
A photo of Boulder, Colorado, shot from above the university campus and looking toward the Flatirons.
November 19, 2024 at 10:38 AM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
aliciacurth.bsky.social
Have I found my people?🥹
aliciacurth.bsky.social Alicia Curth @aliciacurth.bsky.social · Nov 18
Yeah I’m just grumpy now that there is no ✨Golden Retriever Energy in ML✨ list for poor delightful people like me
November 19, 2024 at 2:59 PM
Reposted by Aaron Schein
dianarycai.bsky.social
I just signed up for the Post-Bayesian online seminar mailing list:
tinyurl.com/postBayes

It will cover "cutting-edge methods for posteriors that no longer rely on Bayes Theorem.
(e.g., PAC-Bayes, generalised Bayes, Martingale posteriors, ...)"
Mailing list contact information
Information to be added to the post-Bayes mailing list.
tinyurl.com
November 19, 2024 at 1:05 PM