Thank you!!

For me, this comes with a responsibility to raise awareness about the challenges of being trans in Singapore. So I wrote a short post about my own journey transitioning since 13 years ago, which you can find here: ztangent.github.io/blog/2026/td...

Happy Trans Day of Visibility! 🏳️‍⚧️

This is my first TDoV since moving back to Singapore, and the 12th since I began my transition. It's been a long and sometimes difficult journey, but somehow I've ended up as the first (to my knowledge) publicly out trans professor in the Singaporean academy (cont.)

NeurIPS has since apologized and adjusted its policy to be in line with ACM and IEEE.

Facing eviction before graduation, MIT student cut off by family raises more than $85K in days A transgender senior says he lost family support after coming out and was denied financial aid adjustments, endangering his ability to finish school.

@rikiwilchins.bsky.social 2026 Mar 18 Advocate
MIT physics student ordered to vacate campus housing before graduation after his family cut him off financially for coming out as trans raises $85K on GoFundMe in days.

Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—th...

Publishers say they’re blocking the Internet Archive because of AI scraping. But shutting out a nonprofit library won’t stop AI—it will damage the public’s best record of the web.

frog on the floorrrr
where'd he come from
nobody knows
where he'll goooo

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

Check out this recent @nature.com paper reporting a field experiment on X. It shows X's algorithm boosts conservative content and downranks traditional media—shifting users’ views on key issues. Switching to chronological doesn’t reverse the effect. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

Wait you did theory of mind for self-driving cars? Very cool!

(Never wanted to work on the perception parts of robotics or AVs, but have worked a lot on and still work on Bayesian inverse planning.)

also just not fun as a vegetarian who tries to avoid killing insects for the most part 😞

just had my first encounter with rice weevils that I recall being aware of, and I am simultaneously upset at the fact that:
- there were bugs suddenly crawling out of my rice
- I have probably already eaten them previously
- apparently this is not especially uncommon with rice bought here
😖

also a cool thing about revisiting this after learning probabilistic programming is that now I could probably write a semantic parser + RSA-style pragmatic disambiguator that implements each of these theories :)

in case people are curious, the diagrams only get more complicated lol

(also according to past Xuan, the homonymic theory is correct)

this prompted me to reread my 1st year college essay on whether proper names w diff. referents are more like indexicals ("I", etc.) vs. homonyms, and I totally forgot I made all these crazy diagrams despite not having taken a philosophy class before

truly doomed to be analytic-philosophy-brained 😅

Also probabilistic programming has its own chapter 😊

Finally bought my first actual copy of "AI: A Modern Approach" (as a reference for the lab) and it's cool to see that assistance games have their own section now!

cc: @dhadfieldmenell.bsky.social

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

as I'm revising my course materials, I keep stumbling upon cool @mc-stan.org developments.

Current favorites:
1. your model has funnels and you exhausted reparametrization ideas: metric = "dense_e" makes your HMC learn about covariance btw parameters. Sloooow, but effective!
1/

Incidentally I think one strong piece of evidence for the theory that (many) emotional expressions and their associated concepts are learned rather than innate is the ever-expanding set of Slack/Discord/etc emoji reactions.

Full paper / original thread here:

bsky.app/profile/yyan...

Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression Yi Yang Teoh & Cendri A. Hutcherson Communications Psychology volume 3, Article number: 169 (2025) Abstract Emotion expressions constitute a vital channel for communication, coordination and connection with others, but despite such valuable functions, people sometimes engage in expressive suppression or substitution (expressing emotions they do not genuinely feel). Yet, how exactly do people decide when and what to express? To answer this question, we developed a computational model that casts emotion expressions as value-based communicative decisions. Our model reveals that while people (N = 254) indeed tended to suppress expressions of anger towards others in anticipation of potential social costs as past work theorizes, they also engaged in other nuanced forms of expressive regulation, especially when their reputation was at stake. Most strikingly, people selectively exaggerated/suppressed expressions of happiness when others made more/less equitable choices, seemingly to communicate stronger normative preferences for fairness than they privately held. Together, these findings yield insights into how people regulate their emotion expressions, providing a mechanistic and unified account of the different expressive behaviors people flexibly engage in to navigate their complex social interactions with others.

I was curious whether people have developed "rational models" of emotional expression, and it looks like there's a very recent paper on the topic!

By @yyangteoh.bsky.social and @cendripetalfrce.bsky.social.

Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression - Communications Psychology People do not always express the emotions they feel truthfully. Computational modelling reveals that people flexibly regulate their emotion expressions by balancing their value as a communicative sign...

Happy to finally see this paper (w/ @cendripetalfrce.bsky.social) out now @commspsychol.nature.com
We built a computational framework to show people flexibly balance communicative benefits against social costs when deciding whether and how to express their emotions. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

One of the earlier feminist lessons I had to learn in life was how to cut off friendships with sexual abusers (+ their friend groups).

I unfortunately had to learn this in high school, but with all the Epstein stuff coming out, I'm reminded that most haven't learned this at all.

example is adapted from @julianje.bsky.social's paper haha

in which my students explain the context-sensitivity of social roles and norms 😅

a phd

other people: reading the Innovator's Dilemma bc they want to run a successful start-up

me rn: reading the Innovator's Dilemma bc I'm a historical materialist 🌹