the key to good writing:
1. Decide 1-3 days before the deadline to rewrite the intro
2. End up drafting the leading phrase "At it's core, human communication is about..."
3. Question life choices

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar?

Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly.

A few examples in thread ↴

Do not let any LLM serve as a form of epistemic grounding for society.

ICYMI, our DomainDemo dataset, which describes how different demographic groups share domains on Twitter, is now available to download!

📄 Data descriptor: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
📈 Interactive app to explore the data: domaindemo.info
💽 Dataset: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Reposting for the #ic2s2 crowd!

UB's new Department of AI and Society is hiring faculty across ranks (Assistant, Associate, Full Professor). We’re looking for transdisciplinary scholars interested in building AI by society, for society. Start dates begin Fall 2025.

More info: www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/57734

Only problem with the baby starting to sleep through the night is that I need to find a new excuse to justify my caffeine intake now

So ICWSM concluded today and it was a blast, was a great honor to attend @icwsm.bsky.social at Copenhagen and present my work with @kennyjoseph.bsky.social and other colleagues. The paper link is here :
ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...,

How information sharing in social media has slowly shifted from public posting to private channels. Strong empirical evidence from Facebook by the one and only Kiran Garimella. DETOX #ICWSM.

In our new paper (w/ @jongreen.bsky.social , @davidlazer.bsky.social, & Philip Resnik), now up in Nature Human Behaviour (nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02223-4), we argue that this tension really speaks to a broader misconceptualization of what misinformation is and how it works.

UB is starting an AI and Society Department. The first job positing is for a postdoc position (F26 or S27 start).

engineering.buffalo.edu/home/researc...

Please reach out if you have questions!

+1000

Not that I'm aware of, although agree that's the natural place to head next. c.ai also just introduced several new models, would be really interesting to explore changes to the site surrounding that! The subreddit (r/CharacterAI) has a lot of interesting thoughts on this.

We did, actually! Only 5 characters / user max were in the sample. I think it definitely could be that we oversample specific fandoms because it's a snowball sample. But I would be surprised, especially given what we've seen on the subreddit, if fanfiction overall is less prevalent than we estimate.

Yea! There's definitely some nuances in the paper on this (possible sampling biases, how we pre-processed for this specific analysis), but our data, at least, was very heavy on a pretty small number of fan-fiction universes.

:/. Definitely had a similar feeling when going back to reread those Wildchat papers after spending time with these data.

Got this written up, fwiw.

Initial takeaways for us - lots of fanfiction and male dominance-centered relationships (e.g. arranged marriages) to roleplay where user is not the dominant male. Longer term, it is interesting to consider what c.ai means for user-gen content.

arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13354

Got this written up, fwiw.

Initial takeaways for us - lots of fanfiction and male dominance-centered relationships (e.g. arranged marriages) to roleplay where user is not the dominant male. Longer term, it is interesting to consider what c.ai means for user-gen content.

arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13354

Sending this out again for anyone in Pittsburgh who lost their NEA grant last week, or is fighting for their NSF money, or who is being RIF'd from their fed job, or who wants to tell an investigative journalist anything, really. You can be anonymized and you will be protected.

I spend a lot of time disparaging those who are failing us in this moment - but today I want to shine a light on all of those who are helping to make the threats to science and universities legible for other scientists and the public🧪 1/

New paper out in Nature Communications 📌
@anetilab.bsky.social members @lgajo.bsky.social and @johanneswachs.bsky.social with @loreb92.bsky.social and Federico Battiston explore "The dynamics of leadership and success in software development teams" 👾

Link to paper ➡️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 New paper out in @journalqd.bsky.social! 🚨
How do different social media platforms connect to each other? In our latest study, we propose that social media can be understood as a system made up of differentiated yet interconnected platforms, shaped by how users share information. #socialmedia🧵

We (a motivated undergrad) have collected a whole bunch of characters and have been looking at what's on the site. Happy to share.

🎉 Acceptance notifications have been sent—congratulations to all the authors!

🔥 If you are a student, be sure to check out the #ICWSM 2025 Student Travel Grant
📅 Deadline: Mar 31, 2025
🔎Details: www.icwsm.org/2025/attend/...
✍️Application form: aaaiforms.wufoo.com/forms/m1xp8i...