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Sireesh Gururaja

@siree.sh

2.4K followers 2.9K following 140 posts

PhD student @ltiatcmu.bsky.social. Working on NLP that centers worker agency. Otherwise: coffee, fly fishing, and keeping peach pits around, for...some reason https://siree.sh

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Dec 17

When I started on ARL project that funds my PhD, the thing we were supposed to build was a "MaterialsGPT".

What is a MaterialsGPT? Where does that idea come from? I got to spend a lot of time thinking about that second question with @davidthewid.bsky.social and Lucy Suchman (!) working on this:

The abstract of a paper titled "Basic Research, Lethal Effects: Military AI Research Funding as Enlistment".

In the context of unprecedented U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) budgets, this paper examines the recent history of DoD funding for academic research in algorithmically based warfighting. We draw from a corpus of DoD grant solicitations from 2007 to 2023, focusing on those addressed to researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Considering the implications of DoD funding for academic research, the paper proceeds through three analytic sections. In the first, we offer a critical examination of the distinction between basic and applied research, showing how funding calls framed as basic research nonetheless enlist researchers in a war fighting agenda. In the second, we offer a diachronic analysis of the corpus, showing how a 'one small problem' caveat, in which affirmation of progress in military technologies is qualified by acknowledgement of outstanding problems, becomes justification for additional investments in research. We close with an analysis of DoD aspirations based on a subset of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant solicitations for the use of AI in battlefield applications. Taken together, we argue that grant solicitations work as a vehicle for the mutual enlistment of DoD funding agencies and the academic AI research community in setting research agendas. The trope of basic research in this context offers shelter from significant moral questions that military applications of one's research would raise, by obscuring the connections that implicate researchers in U.S. militarism.

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Reposted by Sireesh Gururaja

Zachary K Stine @zacharykstine.bsky.social · Sep 7

How to not do computational humanities:

(1) Lay out a question/hypothesis about a complex, cultural domain.

(2) Compute numbers that were inspired by (1) but without sufficiently formalizing (1) so as to meaningfully link to it.

(3) Interpret numbers to mean whatever your prior vibes were.

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Sep 1

At least some part of this is happening independently! smokesignal.events/about

About - Smoke Signal

smokesignal.events

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Aug 25

So excited to be TAing this course! So much of the knowledge you have as a PhD student is expected to be gained by osmosis, and it leads to some odd holes and gaps. This course should fix most of that problem!

Maarten Sap @maartensap.bsky.social · Aug 25

I'm excited cause I'm teaching/coordinating a new unique class, where we teach new PhD students all the "soft" skills of research, incl. ideation, reviewing, presenting, interviewing, advising, etc.

Each lecture is taught by a different LTI prof! It takes a village! maartensap.com/11705/Fall20...

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Aug 18

Fwiw, this is *very* neatly borne out in US military funding solicitations! Control theory really exercised a powerful conceptual hold for a long time

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Aug 13

South Asia has plenty of love and use for mayonnaise, just mostly in street food instead of what is considered traditional!

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Aug 4

Is Cluely...somehow ethical now?

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Aug 2

👀👀👀

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Aug 1

The military keynesianism of our day (though it's of course possible that military keynesianism is the military keynesianism of our day, and this is just _another_ one)

Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · Aug 1

The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/

The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone*

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sili...

chart: capital expenditures, quarterly

shows hockey-stick like growth in the capex expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and meta, almost entirely on data centers

in the most recent quarter it was nearly $100 billion, collectively

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 30

I need one of these sized for a cone!!

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 28

Womp, wrong hashtag: #acl2025

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 28

We argue that models need to be better along four axes: they need to be accessible, personalizable, support iteration, and socially aware.

How might we do that? Come to the poster to find out!

I had so much fun doing this work with Nupoor, @jerelev.bsky.social and @strubell.bsky.social!

Beyond Text: Characterizing Domain Expert Needs in Document Research

Sireesh Gururaja, Nupoor Gandhi, Jeremiah Milbauer, Emma Strubell. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. 2025.

aclanthology.org

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 28

Modern tools struggle to support many of these use cases. Even where research exists for certain problems, such as with terminology drift, it requires writing code to effectively use, and is therefore inaccessible, while the accessible tools do not address those use cases at all.

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 28

We also saw that they maintained deeply personal methods for reading documents, which led to idiosyncratic, iteratively constructed mental models of the corpora.

Our findings echo early findings in STS, most notably Bruno Latour's account of the social construction of facts!

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 28

Most notably, experts tended to maintain and use nuanced models of the social production of the documents they read. In the sciences, this might look like asking whether a paper follows standard practices in a field, where it was published, and whether it looks "too neat"

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 28

Coming soon (6pm!) to the #ACL poster session: how do experts work with collections of documents, and do LLMs do those things?

tl;dr: only sometimes! While we have good tools for things like information extraction, the way that experts read documents goes deeper - come to our poster to learn more!

Screenshot of paper title "Beyond Text: Characterizing Domain Expert Needs in Document Research"

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 28

@mariaa.bsky.social's: bsky.app/profile/did:...

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 26

Yay, thank you! Was going to do this later today, and now I don't have to 🌞

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 25

It also feels like a credibility thing - having been in industry without a PhD, you rarely have the leeway to push for even slightly risky things. By the time you've built that credibility, it's hard not to have internalized the practice of risk minimization

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 25

Excited to listen to this! Personalizable viz is so promising, and it's still *so* complicated, at least in my experience

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 16

This thread really does make me wonder why we moved away from soft prompt tuning. I can see the affordance benefit of being able to write the prompts, but it doesn't feel like there is necessarily a "theory" of prompt optimization in discrete space that makes it worth keeping prompts in language

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 13

The answer is yes - East if you're from West of here, Midwest if you're from further east. And also a secret third thing! (rust belt)

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jul 2

This looks incredible!! Very excited to read it 👀👀

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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jun 23

ok, reading a bit more, I could def see Kenneth Goldsmith advocating this point. Ty for the reference!

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jun 23

Do you have a link to this? I'd love to read more - what aesthetic innovation removes the necessity of the human element to appreciation?

Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · Jun 17

All of these sound great! I would also maybe suggest rather than (or maybe in addition to) a starter pack, a list of attendees - that way, the list can back a custom feed, capturing things that aren't explicitly tagged for the conference, and the feed also becomes interest-based after the conf

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