Sai Chintala
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saichandc.bsky.social
Sai Chintala
@saichandc.bsky.social
130 followers 540 following 8 posts
Assistant Professor of Marketing, LKCSB, SMU
https://saichandchintala.github.io/
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Reposted by Sai Chintala
avehtari.bsky.social
All the material for my Bayesian Data Analysis course is available online, including the lectures, which we re-recorded this fall (some of them by @aloctavodia.bsky.social and Noa Kallioinen while I was on vacation). The video links are listed in the schedule at avehtari.github.io/BDA_course_A...
Bayesian Data Analysis course - Aalto 2025 – Bayesian Data Analysis course
avehtari.github.io
December 11, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
laurenleek.eu
I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants - and how I built a dashboard to see through it
I wanted a dinner recommendation and got a research agenda instead. Using 13000+ restaurants, I rebuild its ratings with machine learning and map how algorithmic visibility actually distributes power.
open.substack.com
December 9, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
paulgp.com
Wrote a new paper on the econometrics of financial event studies, would value feedback! It's very new.

With my amazing grad student Tianshu Lyu www.tianshulyu.com, who is on the market. You should hire him!

paulgp.com/papers/finan...
Financial event studies, ubiquitous in finance research, typically use linear factor models with known factors to estimate abnormal returns and identify causal effects of information events. This paper demonstrates that when factor models are misspecified an almost certain reality traditional event study estimators produce inconsistent estimates of treatment effects. The bias is particularly severe during volatile periods, over long horizons, and when event timing correlates with market conditions. We derive precise conditions for identification and expressions for asymptotic bias. As an alternative, we propose synthetic control methods that construct replicating portfolios from control secu rities without imposing specific factor structures. Revisiting four empirical applications, we show that some established findings may reflect model misspecification rather than true treatment effects. While traditional methods remain reliable for short-horizon studies with random event timing, our results suggest caution when interpreting long-horizon or volatile-period event studies and highlight the importance of quasi experimental designs when available.
November 19, 2025 at 4:43 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
jacobtomlinson.dev
For Python package management I use a mixture of pixi, uv and conda depending on the task I'm doing.

I wrote up a long form post about the history of these tools, why each one exists, and why I settled on these choices in my workflow.

jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/p...
Python package managers: uv vs pixi?
When I talk to people about Python package management in 2025 I see the following tools in active use; uv, pixi, pip, conda, mamba, micromamba and poetry. There may be others, but I don’t hear much ab...
jacobtomlinson.dev
November 18, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
johnholbein1.bsky.social
This is terrifying.

"[AI agents] can... infer a researcher's latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them."

...

"We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people" [email protected]
November 18, 2025 at 9:03 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
brendannyhan.bsky.social
From my colleague; paper here dropbox.com/scl/fi/55uok...
joshmccrain.bsky.social Josh McCrain @joshmccrain.bsky.social · Nov 18
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 18, 2025 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
iannlou.bsky.social
40 years ago today the world was introduced to a small boy and his best friend. Happy birthday Calvin & Hobbes.
Calvin & Hobbes walking along a tree trunk laid across a river as a bridge.
November 18, 2025 at 6:37 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
gmcd.bsky.social
To borrow another example, taken from the `dbreg` README: github.com/grantmcdermo...

Here I am running a fixed-effects regression on 180 million(!) row parquet dataset... and it completes **< 2 seconds**... on my laptop 🤯

This is powered by @duckdb.org under the hood.

#rstats #econsky
Running dbreg::dbreg() on a full year of NYC taxi data... and it takes less than 2 seconds. dbreg( tip_amount ~ fare_amount + passenger_count | month + vendor_name, path = "read_parquet('nyc-taxi/**/*.parquet')", ## path to hive-partitioned dataset vcov = "hc1" ) #> [dbreg] Estimating compression ratio... #> [dbreg] Data has 178,544,324 rows and 24 unique FE groups. #> [dbreg] Using strategy: compress #> [dbreg] Executing compress strategy SQL #> #> Compressed OLS estimation, Dep. Var.: tip_amount #> Observations.: 178,544,324 (original) | 70,782 (compressed) #> Standard Errors: Heteroskedasticity-robust #> Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) #> fare_amount 0.106744 0.000068 1564.742 < 2.2e-16 *** #> passenger_count -0.029086 0.000106 -273.866 < 2.2e-16 *** #> --- #> Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
August 25, 2025 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
rjme.bsky.social
What it took to get tenure in the Batman Studies Department in the 1960s, and what it takes to get tenure in Batman Studies today...
July 12, 2025 at 2:24 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
joshuafmask.bsky.social
LLMs are probably trained on a lot of pirated data. This working paper provides interesting evidence.

www.nber.org/papers/w33598
March 24, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
robinlinacre.bsky.social
New blog: Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing:
www.robinlinacre.com/recommend_du...
Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing
Why DuckDB has become my go-to tool for data processing, offering simplicity, speed, and powerful features.
www.robinlinacre.com
March 16, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
davidgasquez.com
DuckDB for processing, Parquet for publishing. Simple and powerful!

www.robinlinacre.com/parquet_api/
March 17, 2025 at 9:31 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
duckdb.org
DuckDB got a local UI. Thanks to our friends at MotherDuck, you can now interact with your DuckDB database through an interactive notebook, running on localhost. Read the announcement blog post at duckdb.org/2025/03/12/d...
March 12, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
nachristakis.bsky.social
Researchers have corrected a disease-causing gene mutation with a single infusion carrying a treatment that precisely targeted the errant gene. The condition affects 100,000 Americans. These genetic treatments were fantasies 30 years ago, but they are now here.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/h...
Mutated DNA Restored to Normal in Gene Therapy Advance
The small study in patients with a rare disorder that causes liver and lung damage showed the potential for precisely targeted infusions.
www.nytimes.com
March 11, 2025 at 2:05 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
neurograce.bsky.social
This is a pretty cool resource for applied ML: a list of "case studies" sourced from different companies describing problems they face and the methods they've tried to solve them.

Anyone know of something like this specific to geospatial/remote sensing data problems? #MLsky #CCAI #GISchat
Evidently AI - ML and LLM system design: 500 case studies
How do top companies apply AI? A database of 500 case studies from 100+ companies with practical ML use cases, LLM applications, and learnings from designing ML and LLM systems.
www.evidentlyai.com
March 8, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
chadbourn.bsky.social
Another health breakthrough.
sailorrooscout.bsky.social Chise @sailorrooscout.bsky.social · Mar 9
THIS IS HUGE! Researchers at Stanford University have developed a dual-antibody treatment that remains effective against ALL SARS-CoV-2 variants by targeting a less-mutable part of the virus. This breakthrough could lead to longer-lasting therapies that OUTPACE viral evolution. 🧪🧵⬇️
March 10, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
dkthomp.bsky.social
Unbelievable news.

Pancreatic is one of the deadliest cancers.

New paper shows personalized mRNA vaccines can induce durable T cells that attack pancreatic cancer, with 75% of patients cancer free at three years—far, far better than standard of care.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
February 27, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
zephoria.bsky.social
My heart ached when I was reminded that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for trying to make academic knowledge more accessible to the public. Meta, meanwhile, is doing it for their own bottom line. I'm going to guess that no one at Meta will be looking at spending 35 years in jail for this.
An image of Aaron Swartz with the following text: "Meta illegally downloaded 80+ TB of books from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models. In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70 GBs of articles from JSTOR (0.0875% of Meta). Faced $1 million in fine and 35 years in jail. Took his own life in 2013.
February 11, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
gautamkamath.com
A *2011* grant from NSERC Research Tools and Instruments, for 60000 CAD, to Geoff Hinton (@geoffreyhinton.bsky.social)

For "Large scale machine learning using GPUs"

Everything you're seeing now started from a pittance of cash given by the Canadian government for fundamental research
February 7, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
brenttoderian.bsky.social
Air pollution has dropped significantly in #Paris in the last 15 years. Mayor @annehidalgo.bsky.social’s leadership has traded car space for green space, safe bike space, kid space.. and traded pollution for people.

Good trade.
Change in Paris air quality between 2007 and 2023 using visuals
January 17, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
pedrosantanna.bsky.social
Here are the first five sets of slides:

01 Introduction: psantanna.com/DiD/01_Intro...

02 Classical 2x2 setup: psantanna.com/DiD/02_two_b...

03 Clustering issues: psantanna.com/DiD/03_Clust...

04 Functional form: psantanna.com/DiD/04_Funct...

05 Covariates: psantanna.com/DiD/05_Covar...
December 30, 2024 at 5:19 AM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
joshuaholland.bsky.social
When he was in the Navy, Jimmy Carter’s submarine was once docked in Bermuda. Some British officers invited only the white crew members to a cocktail party or something like that, and Carter said that if the crewmen of color weren’t invited then nobody was going. This was in the 1950s.
December 29, 2024 at 9:25 PM
Reposted by Sai Chintala
alondra.bsky.social
Jimmy Carter was the only US President to have lived in public housing.

He lived a life of service and consequence. May he rest in peace.
washingtonpost.com The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · Dec 29
For decades, he and his wife Rosalynn spent a week a year building homes with Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit organization that constructs housing for low-income people.

Wearing their own tool belts, they helped build or renovate about 4,300 homes. wapo.st/49ZLa55
Former President Jimmy Carter, left, and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, work at a Habitat for Humanity building site Monday, November 2, 2015, in Memphis, Tennessee. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, have volunteered a week of their time annually to Habitat for Humanity since 1984, events dubbed "Carter work projects" that draw thousands of volunteers and take months of planning.
December 30, 2024 at 12:41 AM