I'll be at #ICML2026 on July 10-11 in Seoul to speak at the Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology.
The workshop is currently accepting submissions, with humanities, ML, HCI, and social/cognitive sciences all welcome.
Submit papers by May 1! Join us in Seoul! 🇰🇷
net losses in 2022, 2023, and 2024, getting worse each time. perhaps 2025 was bad as well
terrible (...we go there a lot)
More broadly, there are many research questions about AI that use findings/data from the social sciences, and since their funding is so low compared to computer science, federal funding goes a *long* way there. SBE is way smaller than CISE, but accounts for a majority of socsci funding in the U.S.
It's crazy and terrible to eliminate SBE, and especially the idea NSF would do it in violation of Congressional direction.
Even if you only cared about AI, it's important. SBE's support of opinion data has crucially helped AI alignment research; for example, data from GSS for LLM eval & modeling.
#polisky share far and wide: @apsa.bsky.social Statement on the Proposed Elimination of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation
apsanet.org/wp-content/u...
evergreen
yeah ime paying for a degree is only done by masters or undergrad. teaching duties, at least substantial ones, are only done by phd students.
that's great. but they also gave some of us (or i misled myself, wanting to believe?) the impression that their funding was more regular or less reliant on regular grant-writing cycles compared to the usual academic or research orgs. if anything it's impressive it lasted as long as it did
"favor real-world applications of AI over building open-source foundation models"
would be moving further in the application vs research spectrum. ai2's open-source model building is in a pretty unique midpoint in that space, compared to commercial industry vs academic/basic research
curious about what you're doing
I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.
the regret was wrong hm
sad all around
ah im wrong. in “20 years of bitext” above mercer claims he said it
mercer’s lifetime award talk covered similar ground but i dunno if it had much new wrt nlp history.
(it had more about mercer ofc which is why political reporters cite it…)
other ibm ppl claimed that was apocryphal
Many rooms were like this at Sofia's National Palace of Culture (ACL 2013). Sadly I didn't photograph the best one, which i remember as a wall mural of a worker being crucified right above the projector screen
deleted a QT discussing a shockingly sexist email written by roger schank. these people were so evil just seeing their emails is not good
to be clear, in this instance the former student went on to a 30 years or so career as a professor, including recognition as a AAAI Fellow.
bsky.app/profile/bren...
i get the impression everyone thought schank was terrible? (very secondhand - he left academia a few decades ago, long before died)
bsky.app/profile/bret...
re centrists complaining about the Mellon Foundation, if this at least this polarizes conservatives into restoring NEH / federal funding for the humanities, that would be nice
whybot prototype for kids
turing test I made for class
I am flabbergasted I am by how much vibe coding has expanded my capacities as a scientist and teacher.
In the last few weeks, I've mocked up class demos of a live turing test, generated cross-references for an encyclopedia, and prototyped new tablet tasks for developmental psych.
It's wild.
pointing at the hamburger menu icon in the top left hand corner of a mobile bluesky app screen
settings menu option circled
content and media menu option circled
autoplay videos and gifs toggled off
to turn off autoplaying video on the bluesky mobile app
select the icon in the top left corner
go to settings
go to content and media
make sure "autoplay videos and gifs" is toggled off
Paul's back and he nails it here
✨The NLP+CSS workshop is returning to ACL 2026!✨
And this year, we have a new shared task with prizes!
Website/CfP: sites.google.com/site/nlpandc...
Deadlines: March 5 (direct), March 24 (pre-reviewed ARR)
#NLProc #CompSocialSci #ComputationalSocialScience #ACL2026NLP
@aclmeeting.bsky.social
"Why agent-based modeling could happen in economics. Eventually." Good piece by @mikemakowsky.bsky.social
economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/29/p...
I'd argue that the "new era of theory" is already underway, though, led not by economists, but by comp social sci/cultural evolution folks.
ah yes bsky.app/profile/dmim...