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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · 3d

Important update about my dog's life

Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · 13d

@isaacsheidlo.bsky.social and I have been talking a lot about how to make robots a pre-distributive technology (can we move away from the individual ownership model?), so I'm going to talk a bit about lessons learned from the AI governance space and what we collectively should be doing w/ robots.

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · 13d

I'm nearly in Seoul for #CoRL2025, where I'll be presenting a talk on "Robots as the testbed for AI, AI as the testbed for Robots" at the Eval&Deploy workshop. Super excited to rep the newly formed Brown GIRAFFE Lab in the wild for the first time :D :D :D @confrobotlearning.bsky.social. Say hi!

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Sep 2

The admin also reversed their position on visas for Chinese students and are processing their visa applications in large numbers. We need to celebrate this too!

Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Sep 2

The house approps budget is out, and it includes a very slight increase to the NIH budget. Senate approps committee held NSF funding steady. Don't back down from this fight!!!

We must celebrate and share our wins, too, to build and maintain momentum.

appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

appropriations.house.gov

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Sep 1

I almost never watch short form video, and I feel like I'm not missing much?

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 26

This is totally unacceptable.

I've followed Lisa Cook for a while since she has developed the leading perspective on AI over at the Fed: www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 22

Emma is amazing, you should apply.

Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · Aug 22

🚨 New postdoc position in our lab at Berkeley EECS! 🚨

(please reshare)

We seek applicants with experience in language modeling who are excited about high-impact applications in the health and social sciences!

More info in thread

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Reposted by Serena Booth

Veena Dubal @veenadubal.bsky.social · Aug 21

Algorithmic Wage Discrimination is spreading beyond 'Gig' work:

Healthcare, Customer Service, & Logistics bosses are buying AI products that set compensation structures & wages using real time data. @wilneida.bsky.social & I did an audit & here are our findings
equitablegrowth.org/how-artifici...

How artificial intelligence uncouples hard work from fair wages through ‘surveillance pay’ practices—and how to fix it

How surveillance pay practices work, where they are increasingly deployed in the U.S. economy, and policy recommendations to ensure pay fairness and transparency.

equitablegrowth.org

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 14

Why not tell her??? If you don't, I will!

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Reposted by Serena Booth

Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · Aug 9

One study shows four in ten data brokers are leaving consumers exercising their privacy rights on read—in violation of California law. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Data Brokers Are Ignoring Privacy Law. We Deserve Better.

Of the many principles EFF fights for in consumer data privacy legislation, one of the most basic is a right to access the data companies have about you. It’s only fair. So many companies collect

www.eff.org

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 9

We shouldn't just be aiming for whistleblower protections. We should borrow from finance land and create whistleblower *incentives* (www.sec.gov/enforcement-...).

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 8

Answers almost all questions with “it depends…”

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 8

The fun lil update is that this work won RLC Outstanding Paper in Emerging Topics :D. Work with Calarina Muslimani, Kerrick Johnstonbaugh, Suyog Chandramouli, @bradknox.bsky.social, and Matt Taylor.

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 6

Paper 2: reward design is hard, sure, but what about goal design? Surely that’s easier? Surely goals are prone to underspecification while rewards are prone to overspecificafion? Not so, at least not in our preliminary work. Specification design overall is hard!!!

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 6

Paper 1: reward design is really hard! So we introduce a method to take a small number of preferences and use those to compute a trajectory alignment coefficient metric, so that the reward designer can assess whether their reward function preserves their preference orderings.

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Aug 6

We have two papers at #RLC!

“Towards Improving Reward Design in RL: A Reward Alignment Metric for RL Practitioners”, lead by Callie Muslimani (Alberta)

&

“Goals vs. Rewards: Towards a Comparative Study of Objective Specification Mechanisms” lead by Septia Rani (CSU).

Come to our posters today!

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Reposted by Serena Booth

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · Jul 24

Applications are open for the Doctoral Consortium at the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society rcais.github.io. Taking place October 27, 2025.

Applications received by September 15 will receive full consideration.

2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society

rcais.github.io

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Jul 22

Fun fact - the ADA was a Republican endeavor, signed into law by H.W.
My great hope for the nation is that we can find shared priorities and get all parties to work in the interests of the people. And maybe we can fix that ridiculous $2000 asset limit sometime???

Center for Democracy & Technology @cdt.org · Jul 21

This Saturday, July 26, is the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which provided broad protections for disabled Americans. We have a lot planned this week to celebrate the anniversary, and to highlight our continued work at the intersection of #DisabilityRights & #TechPolicy!

Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Jul 21

I see a lot of myself in this article. After Harvard, I went to Google for 2 years - partly because I needed the money to build a nest egg, and partly because I didn't know what else to do. But at Google I was able to start to be braver and feel more passionate. Maybe 4 years just isn't enough?

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Reposted by Serena Booth

Monica Agrawal @monicaagrawal.bsky.social · Jul 15

Excited to be at #ICML2025 to present our paper on 'pragmatic misalignment' in (deployed!) RAG systems: narrowly "accurate" responses that can be profoundly misinterpreted by readers.

It's especially dangerous for consequential domains like medicine! arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14898

A person searching for risks of surgery. A traditional search engine would surface websites that would likely include both pros and cons of the surgery. However, RAG results only excerpt the cons.

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Jul 14

I'll also be giving a talk at the DIG-BUGS workshop on Saturday (3:45-4:15)! I'll talk about what data quality looks like for reward functions and preferences.

Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Jul 14

Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=j5e...

Position: Strong Consumer Protection is an Inalienable Defense for...

Consumer protection laws are designed to protect consumers from unethical business practices. In this position paper, I argue that these laws serve an emergent dual purpose: if appropriately...

openreview.net

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Jul 14

I'll be sharing this poster on Thursday at 11am, but I'm ***always*** happy to chat about AI and consumers or workers.

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Serena Booth @reniebird.bsky.social · Jul 14

I'll be presenting a position paper about consumer protection and AI in the US at ICML. I have a surprisingly optimistic take: our legal structures are stronger than I anticipated when I went to work on this issue in Congress.

Is everything broken rn? Yes. Will it stay broken? That's on us.

A poster for the paper "Position: Strong Consumer Protection is an Inalienable Defense for AI Safety in the United States"

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