🚨 NSF is already quietly eliminating the SBE Directorate, despite Congress’ mandate that NSF support the behavioral & social sciences.
Steps to counter this are in motion.
If you
- have an SBE proposal under review
- serve on an SBE grant panel
You can help! Fill out this form: shorturl.at/xuKw2
Boston University’s student paper, The Daily Free Press, reports about the multiplication of pride flags on campus following the administration’s attempted crackdown on free speech.
If you are interested in doing high-impact, public-facing research ... Join Our Research Team! We are hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. socialmedialab.ca/2026/03/04/p... #PhDSky #AcademicSky #comsky
This Fall, I’m joining the University of Georgia as an Assistant Professor!
I want to push on the fundamentals of software reverse engineering, from decompilation to how humans actually understand code.
I’m looking for PhD students, collaborators, and sponsors. More below.
The meme with a guy and two girls. The guy is labeled 1:59 AM. His girlfriend islabeled 2 AM. The cute girl coming the other way is labeled 3AM.
The US and Canada go to Daylight Savings Time tomorrow morning.
Our paper "Loki: Proactively discovering online scams by mining toxic search queries" won a Distinguished Paper Award at NDSS 2026!
📜 arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12181
Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out!
github.com/gianlucasb/h...
Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out!
github.com/gianlucasb/h...
Welcome! MA professor here who’s research funding has been almost entirely terminated by the admin
“If America’s university presidents believe that their foremost responsibility is simply to keep their institutions operational — collecting tuition and protecting endowments — they are mistaken… presidents and chancellors are stewards of intellectual freedom and democratic norms.”
Screenshot of the title page of Alex' paper - "The Adverse Effects of Omitting Records in Differential Privacy: How Sampling and Suppression Degrade the Privacy–Utility Tradeoff"
💥The year starts with great news:💥
🍾Àlex' paper accepted at USENIX Sec🎉
He demonstrates how suppression (and: sampling as one special case) may amplify privacy but yields disproportionate utility loss.
It's been hard work: 🚀per aspera ad astra🌟
Congrats, we're proud!
arxiv.org/abs/2601.05180
The way I interpret this, is that this is finally the year of Linux on the desktop
Great work! I wanted to write a paper on civitai but never got to it. Great to see that someone did!
Two-panel figure showing example Civitai bounty pages. Panel (a) displays the ``Civitai Official Bounty - Swamp Monster Style LoRA'' bounty page featuring two unblurred fantasy creature images: a moss-covered humanoid creature and a colorful frog-like monster with large eyes. The bounty details show it's a LoRA creation type, base model SD 1.5, started October 16, 2023, with deadline October 23, 2023. A completion banner indicates prizes have been awarded to winners. The supporter section shows a user avatar with a 50,000 buzz reward. Panel (b) shows ``Dno's 2k Special'' bounty page with two blurred images of different content ratings - one marked as R with a ``Show'' button overlay, and another marked as XXX with a ``Show'' button. The bounty type is image creation, started September 22, 2025, with deadline October 23, 2025. Supporter names are redacted for privacy.
Four-panel figure showing Civitai bounty statistics. Panel (a) shows a horizontal bar chart of bounty counts by type, with LoRA having the most bounties at 2,984, followed by Image at 1,475, Model at 138, and decreasing to Video at 35. Panel (b) displays a horizontal bar chart of bounty themes by proportion, with NSFW being the largest category at approximately 0.43 (comprising 2,286 bounties split between platform-labeled and GPT-4.1 classified NSFW shown with diagonal hatching), followed by Fictional Characters at 1,463 bounties. Panel (c) presents stacked horizontal bars showing NSFW versus SFW proportions for each bounty type, with Video being 69\% NSFW and Embed being 82\% SFW. Panel (d) shows a time series from November 2023 to January 2025 displaying the proportion of SFW (decreasing trend line) and NSFW (increasing trend line) bounties over time, with 95\% confidence intervals shown as shaded regions around each trend line and vertical dashed lines marking the start of 2024 and 2025.
Two-panel figure analyzing deepfake bounties on Civitai. Panel (a) shows gender distribution split into two horizontal bar charts. The top chart displays NSFW deepfake bounties with Female at 95.8\% and Male at 4.2\%. The bottom chart shows SFW deepfake bounties with Female at 89.6\%, Male at 10.1\%, and Non-binary at 0.3\%. Panel (b) presents a stacked horizontal bar chart showing the profession distribution across all deepfakes, with bars color-coded for NSFW (red) and SFW (blue) categories. Actor/actress leads at 39.3\% of deepfakes, followed by Influencer at 13.9\%, Adult worker at 13.0\%, Artist at 10.2\%, Miscellaneous at 8.4\%, Model at 7.4\%, Athlete at 5.3\%, Self/spouse at 1.2\%, Reporter at 0.9\%, and Producer at 0.3\%. The x-axis shows the number of bounties ranging from 0 to 140.
🚨 New working paper 🚨
What happens when you add money + competition to generative AI creation?
On Civitai—a prominent platform for gen-AI content/tools w. millions of users—you get a growing marketplace for NSFW requests and a nontrivial stream of deepfakes.
Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.09117 🧪
Universities, companies, and government agencies that continue to operate on X, now that this is clearly documented (majority of content included sexualized images of women and children) are actively supporting "industrial-scale abuse." Paid subscribers can still do this.
1/ Thoughts on the state of federal higher ed policy: Showing the limits of Trump’s power, he asked Congress to gut research funding, cut access programs, and end support for MSIs. Congress said no. But … the government will need to stay open and Trump will have to approve the funding packages.
⏰ Less than two weeks left to apply!
@isi.it & CRT Foundation offer 10 one-year scholarships in data science & AI, applied to: 🩺 public health · 🌍 humanitarian response · 🏙️ urban development · ♻️ sustainability
📅 Deadline: Feb 2, 2026
🔗 Details here: sites.google.com/view/lagrang...
And after being praised for it, "glowing and laughing about it"
Senior academic roles in Cyber Security at De Montfort University Leicester (ACE-CSE Gold; 20+ academics in cyber; great facilities; research links with AI and with social responsibility), professor and associate professor. Closing 18 Jan.
Folks, she brought a whole plate of spaghetti to the broadcast center to do her headshot. She then houses that spaghetti.
Mattia sips on an espresso during his.
Truly the heroes we need during these times.
Sunlit dogs in doorway
My daily audience while writing grant proposals
The fun thing about watching the movie 2001 in 2025 is you realize HAL is just an LLM and so *obviously* it’s going to murder its crewmembers every few flights due to malformed JSON.
2025 was a tough year, but we are still here. To all academics out there, may 2026 be a great year! 🎉
PhD students in AI: Bell Labs Cambridge is hiring Summer 2026 interns in Social & #ResponsibleAI.
Paid, 3 months, visa support, publication-focused.
Work on AI ethics, risk, governance, and human values.
Deadline: Jan 11, 2026.
Sunrise in Waikiki
The 2025 @acsacconf.bsky.social is ready to start! Looking forward to three days of papers and discussions. Come say hi if you are around!
Is the memo available anywhere? This looks like a very broad set of topics, "online safety" can mean anything really
System process for LoanWatch
Our paper "The Cost of Convenience: Identifying, Analyzing, and Mitigating Predatory Loan Applications on Android" was accepted at ASIACCS 2026! Work led by my student Olawale Akanji. Stay tuned for the PDF!
When people falsely claim that we are doing censorship work, I think, in many cases, what they are trying to do is stop us from trying to understand the harms they are trying to push...using bad information.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=kFoO...
