Vijay V.
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vijaytarian.bsky.social
Vijay V.
@vijaytarian.bsky.social
140 followers 190 following 1 posts
PhD student at CMU. I do research on applied NLP ("alignment", "synthetic data"). he/him
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Reposted by Vijay V.
chrmanning.bsky.social
Maybe vilifying China & Chinese people, and increasing visa hassles & investigations aren’t smart moves for keeping the US lead in AI—given the number of engineers trained in China vs US?

“Many Chinese students are not that interested in full-time jobs in the US.”

restofworld.org/2025/china-a...
DeepSeek’s rise shows why China’s top AI talent is skipping Silicon Valley
Young Chinese engineers focus on homegrown innovation, drawn by fewer visa hurdles and the chance to build a future on their own terms.
restofworld.org
February 5, 2025 at 9:34 PM
Reposted by Vijay V.
ltiatcmu.bsky.social
Are you a pre-doctoral student interested in language technologies, especially focusing on safe, fair and inclusive AI? Our Summer 2025 Language Technology for All Internship could be a great fit. See the link below for more info, and to apply:
lti.cs.cmu.edu/news-and-eve...
CMU LTI Language Technology for All Internship 2025 - Language Technologies Institute - School of Computer Science - Carnegie Mellon University
The LTI is currently seeking applicants for the summer 2025 Language Technology for All Internship
lti.cs.cmu.edu
January 6, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Vijay V.
siree.sh
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.
December 17, 2024 at 2:33 PM
Reposted by Vijay V.
davidthewid.bsky.social
📢 NEW Paper!

@siree.sh, Lucy Suchman, and I examine a corpus of 7,000 US Military grant solicitations to ask what the world’s largest military wants with to do with AI, by looking at what it seeks to fund. #STS

📄: arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17840

We find…
Basic Research, Lethal Effects: Military AI Research Funding as Enlistment David Gray Widder Digital Life Initiative, Cornell University Sireesh Gururaja School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Lucy Suchman Department of Sociology, Lancaster University Abstract 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. Keywords: artificial intelligence; US Department of Defense; military; funding; investment, war
December 9, 2024 at 2:18 PM