Arjen P. de Vries
@arjenpdevries.bsky.social
https://arjenp.dev/ and @arjen@idf.social
A Tech Founder Wanted to Start a New Country. An Actual Country Got in the Way. Wall Street Journal covers Network State cult founder Balaji Srinivasan. “Federal records indicate he and his wife renounced American citizenship in 2023.” 👀 Gift link: www.wsj.com/tech/a-tech-...
A Tech Founder Wanted to Start a New Country. An Actual Country Got in the Way.
Balaji Srinivasan says he believes America is descending into anarchy. His solution: Build a new country from scratch.
wsj.com
I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.
and this summer is one of the coolest of the rest of our lives, I hope everyone keeps that clearly in mind. Until emissions are zero, warming, fire, floods, drought, destruction and death will all keep climbing. Simple.
Super happy that our paper “Topic-Specific Classifiers are Better Relevance Judges than Prompted LLMs” just won Best Student Paper at #SIGIR2026🏆 It argues against the reflex to reach for an LLM whenever you need relevance judgments. What we found 🧵:
Komkommertijd 'Witte mannen naar achteren' van Sophie Straat geen discriminatie, vinden meldpunten - https://nos.nl/l/2624161 #wtf #whitemales #privilige
'Witte mannen naar achteren' van Sophie Straat geen discriminatie, oordeelt meldpunt
Tijdens de Gentse Feesten verduidelijkte de zangeres haar eerdere uitspraken en vroeg zij bezoekers om zich eens wat vaker in andere mensen te verplaatsen.
nos.nl
𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐬, 𝐋𝐋𝐌𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐃𝐨 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐀𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐑𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐥 ✒️Lukas Gienapp, Jenny Lang, Martin Potthast, Harrisen Scells dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐖𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐲 𝐖𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬: 𝐀 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐃𝐄'𝐬 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 ✒️Gregory Polyakov, Harrisen Scells, Carsten Eickhoff arxiv.org/abs/2605.19628
Understanding Wacky Weights: A Dissection of SPLADE's Learned Term Importance
Learned sparse retrieval models such as SPLADE combine the effectiveness of neural architectures with the efficiency of inverted indices. As these models assign weights to terms from a fixed…
arxiv.org
Oscar Rolando Ramirez Milian, Harrie Oosterhuis An Epistemic Position-Based Click Model: From Interactions to Epistemic Distributions of Relevance and Bias https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18712
Inspiring keynote by Cecile Paris on lessons from the history in NLP and IR that can and should inform our future research, especially through learning from models of human-human communication (aka "user modelling"). And a really nice photo from Dagstuhl 1985, with KSJ #SIGIR2026
Ready for our tutorial at #SIGIR2026 Reasoning for IR & IR for Reasoning reasoning-for-ir.github.io John us in Eureka 2!
Arjen P. de Vries Timmers 🕊️@arjen.idf.social.ap.brid.gy · 2w agoOur #SIGIR2026 Tutorial starting in Eureka 2! https://reasoning-for-ir.github.io/ Mohanna Hoveyda, Panagiotis Eustratiadis, Arjen P. de Vries, and Maarten de Rijke. 2026. Reasoning for IR & IR for Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR […] [Original post on idf.social]
Our #SIGIR2026 Tutorial starting in Eureka 2! https://reasoning-for-ir.github.io/ Mohanna Hoveyda, Panagiotis Eustratiadis, Arjen P. de Vries, and Maarten de Rijke. 2026. Reasoning for IR & IR for Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR […] [Original post on idf.social]
Original post on idf.social
idf.social
After watching the soccer final in Melbourne with long time IR friends 🤗 Getting up at 4.30am, jet lag to the rescue! #SIGIR2026 #Spain #Argentina #Final
This week in Melbourne, Informagus, the Information Retrieval research group from Radboud University, NL, participates actively in many parts of the ACM SIGIR and ICTIR 2026 conferences. Please come check out our contributions if you attend as well! #SIGIR2026 #ICTIR2026
This week I am in Melbourne, with this sunrise at my arrival, for #SIGIR2026 the ACM SIGIR 2026 conference! Looking forward to learning a lot and seeing many old friends!
What do you do your first day back in Oz?! Go and watch that 4K restoration of Strictly Ballroom in a movie theatre / museum downtown Melbourne, the ACMI, what else! It was as lovely a film as I remembered! (Baz Luhrmann is my fav director.) Here's some […] [Original post on idf.social]
The Trump administration is actively undermining European democracies. State Department has now launched grants (1-3 million $), designed to boost groups pushing MAGA style policies. Direct, blatant interference in sovereign nations. www.ft.com/content/e2ad...
US to fund Trump-aligned Europeans building ‘civilisational bonds’
State department grants of up to $3mn are designed to boost groups pushing Maga-style policies
ft.com
"He was a mentor who was there because he cared about people and the research and not because he had something to gain. Thanks Frank for being just that!"
Arjen P. de Vries Timmers 🕊️@arjen.idf.social.ap.brid.gy · 3w agoIn memoriam Frank Nack - Informatics Institute - University of Amsterdam https://ivi.uva.nl/content/news/2026/07/in-memoriam-frank-nack.html David Ayman Shamma wrote an IM worth the read, whether you knew Frank or not: https://shamurai.substack.com/p/remembering-frank-nack
Interesting thread on students' learning behaviour (and failure) when they may resort to AI tools.
Dr. Casey Fiesler@cfiesler.bsky.social · 3w agoBeen thinking a lot about the students in this class (presumably, but not certainly) using AI on a take-home midterm and then bombing the in-class final. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty... But I think the real story here is not *that* students use AI, it's (part of) *why* students use AI. 🧵
Datacenter Microsoft gebruikt 1 procent van alle Nederlandse stroom, Google wil geen inzage geven in verbruik www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/...
Datacenter Microsoft gebruikt 1 procent van alle Nederlandse stroom, Google wil geen inzage geven in verbruik
Netcongestie: Microsoft geeft als eerste grote Amerikaanse partij inzicht in het stroomverbruik van zijn datacenters in Nederland. Dat is groot, en groeit de komende jaren bovendien hard. Terwijl ande...
nrc.nl
Why would any country reject an international court established to rule according to international law? The only explanation I can give is that such a country **does not value human rights**. That it puts its own peoples' merit and rights above the rights of others. The country that likes to […]
Original post on idf.social
idf.social
Small open models are getting genuinely good at document parsing: OvisOCR2 (0.9B, Apache 2.0) is claiming SOTA on OmniDocBench v1.6. Day-1 recipe: OCR a whole HF image dataset — digitised newspapers, archives, zines — to markdown with one command. huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr
Uitgever Sage heeft acht artikelen teruggetrokken van de ontslagen wetenschapper van de Radboud Universiteit die data manipuleerde. Yannick Griep was co-auteur van de artikelen in kwestie, die werden gepubliceerd in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift waarvan hij hoofdredacteur was.
Uitgever trekt acht artikelen van ontslagen Radboudwetenschapper terug - Vox magazine
Uitgever SAGE heeft acht artikelen teruggetrokken van de ontslagen wetenschapper van de Radboud Universiteit die data manipuleerde. De voormalige wetenschapper was co-auteur van de artikelen in kwesti...
voxweb.nl
Highlights include Kevin Morby, Westside Cowboy, Naaz, Panic Shack, the XX, but it was so much fun, a list does no justice to the festival experience! If only to add David Byrne, El Nina, Matt Berninger, All them Witches, The Last Dinner Party, Folkbitch Trio, De Staat, CMAT, and all the DJs […]
Original post on idf.social
idf.social
Returned from a great weekend full of music and other entertainment at DTRH 2026, the picture is the view from the main stage looking out over the water, taken right after the Florence and the Machine show #dtrh2026
EFF and our allies are fighting back against proposal to replace neutral internet standards that encourage openness into restrictive requirements designed to monetize internet access. Help protect the rules that keep the web free and open. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF
The ability to access publicly available information using automated tools is a central value and benefit of a free and open internet. Automated access—often called crawling or scraping—powers
eff.org
Mastodon v4.6 introduced a new feature called "Collections" to enable people introduce others to the Fediverse, e.g. by theme. So here is the "Information Retrieval @ Fedi" collection. If you are active on Mastodon and want to be included, LMK, max 25 slots but we can always split by subtopic.
Arjen P. de Vries Timmers 🕊️@arjen.idf.social.ap.brid.gy · 2mo agoCheck out my new collection "Information Retrieval @ Fedi": https://idf.social/collections/116771897775057321
[Mastodon is the true European, independent, open standards-based and decentralised, social media solution! The greatest strength for democracy: No centralised entity that politicians could exercise control over.] RE: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/116766336607908530 With cool functions like […]
Original post on idf.social
idf.social