Tegan Maharaj - moving slow and fixing things
@teganmaharaj.bsky.social
AI prof at Mila (HEC) trying to make the future more cooperative and cool 😎🌍️ Deep learning, real-world generalization, responsible AI, safety, risk, climate, ecology, artscience, opensource, anticolonial AI they/she teganmaharaj.neocities.org
"if you run that forward just four decades,” Wagner says, “we’re talking about nearly half the tree of life disappearing in one human lifetime. That is absolutely catastrophic.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...
‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects
A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides
theguardian.com
Summary of the bill that just passed. All the environmental/climate rollbacks are despair-inducing enough, but also 14215 and the other power-consolidation tactics .... oof www.reddit.com/media?url=ht...
Reddit - https://preview.redd.it/r3lm5muq1f2f1.png?width=1568&format=png&auto=webp&s=f1219b66ecde453a5a6a66f1de9fcc4bb64454df
reddit.com
Apparent unknown species of bacteria (named Niallia tiangongensis) discovered in China's Tiangon space station #astrobiology 🔭🧪🧫🔬 www.sciencealert.com/unknown-spec... www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
Unknown Species of Bacteria Discovered in China's Space Station
Swabs from China's Tiangong space station reveal traces of a bacterium unseen on Earth, with characteristics that may help it function under stressful environmental conditions hundreds of kilometers a...
sciencealert.com
2025, and it's news that "women's pain should be treated". in 2019 I had an IUD put in with no anesthetic, it hurt like hell and I had 6 months of debilitating cramps before I got it taken out (I sometimes couldn't walk, or threw up). I was encouraged by the (female) doctor to leave it in.
These boxes are not moving. A mind-bending optical illusion by Japanese artist Jagarikin.
I greatly enjoyed “The Spectrum of AI Risks” panel at the Singapore Conference on AI. Thanks @teganmaharaj.bsky.social for great moderating, Max Tegmark for the invitation, and the organizers and other panelists for a great event! PS. Do I really have sad resting panel face? 😐
And you thought the left was censorious. How about actual censoring?
Alessandro Rigolon@alerigolon.bsky.social · 2y agoI was just told that I have to remove “climate” from the title of an ongoing grant if I want to keep it. And publications from that grant cannot include “climate” and other forbidden words. I can’t believe I’m writing this from the United States of America. #AcademicSky
BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones
US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.
nature.com
May Day Reminder: The Federal Minimum Wage - in the richest country EVER - is still only $7.25/hr. UNACCEPTABLE.
Does this seem true to you? Why or why not? It seems plausible to me, but definitely not certain.
Chris Hayes@chrislhayes.bsky.social · last yr.One of the arguments neoliberals made about "free trade" in the late 1990s, was that it would reduce military conflict. I don't think that quite bore out the way they said, but it does strike me as true that destroying the US-China trade relationship WILL make military confrontation much more likely
www.cbc.ca/news/science... :'( 84%
Most of world's colourful corals go white in record-breaking bleaching | CBC News
The world's rainbow reefs have gone ghostly white in seas around the globe due to record heat in the oceans, the International Coral Reef Initiative reports. But scientists say the reefs aren't all de...
cbc.ca
Disaster Preparedness for AI Safety -- Just gave a talk at the #ICLR #Alignment workshop on a new report I'm working on - if you would like to contribute or chat about it, please get in touch!
This was dope. Brief, not a line wasted. Sums up vast literatures + outlines a problem among the most important in all of bio. An "opinion" piece w/ as much depth as many reviews. "Fighting change with change: adaptive variation in an uncertain world" Working link: bio.utexas.edu/research/mey...
bio.utexas.edu
Ricard Solé@ricardsole.bsky.social · last yr.How do biological systems cope with their changing worlds? This is a deep problem within evolutionary biology. In this paper by @sfiscience.bsky.social external faculty Lauren Ancel Meyers and James Bull, an elegant unifying picture is provided zo.utexas.edu/research/mey...
For #rstats people working on computing environments without GUI, you should check out the package `txtplot`. E.g. this density plot is pretty useful to get an idea what my data looks like:
👉 👈 Meta announced that they're changing their models to reduce "left-leaning [political] bias"--that means leaning them to the political "right". Lots to unpack about what that might mean. So I ran a quick "shot in the dark" study...and found a *political right* bias in Meta models. Some notes.🧵
📢Curious why your LLM behaves strangely after long SFT or DPO? We offer a fresh perspective—consider doing a "force analysis" on your model’s behavior. Check out our #ICLR2025 Oral paper: Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuning! (0/12)
I'm in Singapore for ICLR! Msg me if you'd like to meet and chat about responsible AI, risk (assessment), disaster preparedness, international collaboration, sustainability, etc 🧷🌏🌱☮️🛟
Latest in the global clawing back of civil rights: Is a woman a woman if she says she's a woman? No! Says a bunch of old British dudes in costumes - a woman is whoever the patriarchal legal system (invented when women were property) says is a woman. 🤦🏽♀️
It's the entire International Maritime Organization, which includes China, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, most South Pacific islands, and most of Europe. US notably absent 🙄. A fixed rate isn't ideal, but I'm taking any international collab step in the right direction as great news rn!
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · last yr."Many of the world’s largest shipping nations decided on Friday to impose a minimum tax of $100 for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted by ships...effectively the first global tax on greenhouse gas emissions." apnews.com/article/ship...
"Preventing nuclear war means preventing the use of nuclear weapons as both blackmail and bombs." "What can Sweden, Finland, and Poland teach the United States about confronting Russia’s nuclear threats?" by Marlena Broeker, current Scoville Fellow for @nukesofhazard.bsky.social.
What Sweden, Finland, and Poland can teach the United States about confronting Russia's nuclear threats
The United States can learn from Russia’s nearest neighbors—Poland, Sweden, and Finland—about how to respond to Russian nuclear blackmail more effectively.
thebulletin.org
Our systematic lit review of algorithm audits, with a focus on linguistic and geographical disparities in the field, is now officially accepted at @facct.bsky.social 🎉🪩 You can read the preprint here! arxiv.org/abs/2401.11194 Looking forward to presenting this one in Athens in June :)
WEIRD Audits? Research Trends, Linguistic and Geographical Disparities in the Algorithm Audits of Online Platforms -- A Systematic Literature Review
The increasing reliance on complex algorithmic systems by online platforms has sparked a growing need for algorithm auditing, a methodology evaluating these systems' functionality and impact. In this ...
arxiv.org
Join us on April 17th for Mila TechAide 2025! 🌟 Hear from amazing speakers in #AI like Sara Hooker, Kyunghyun Cho, Golnoosh Farnadi, David Adelani, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, and Tegan Maharaj. All proceeds support #Centraide. Let's make a difference together! 💡🤝 Get your tickets now! t.co/EBsatAqGTA
Mila Techaide 2025 | Mila
Conférence IA d'une journée au profit de Centraide du Grand Montréal
mila.quebec
New Paper! I'm truly excited to share @natematias.bsky.social and my new Policy Forum in Science published yesterday. We evaluate science's ability to address technological harms, and offer recommendations for what could be done to improve on the status quo: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Fixing the science of digital technology harms
Technology development outpaces scientific assessment of impacts
science.org
I've been doing the news 3-4 days on, 3-4 days off since January - highly recommend.
i gave a talk this morning mapping the surveillance AI pipeline, where i spent a substantial amount of time explaining how the cycle from data -> AI -> surveillance is intentionally obfuscated. this article would have saved me time with its relative transparency www.npr.org/2025/04/09/g...
U.S. says it is now monitoring immigrants' social media for antisemitism
Effective immediately, the government says it will begin screening immigrant social media for activity that officials think indicates support for antisemitism.
npr.org
"We provide many avenues for all voices to be heard. Importantly, we ask that this be done in a way that does not cause a business disruption. If that happens, we ask participants to relocate” www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...
Microsoft terminates jobs of engineers who protested use of AI products by Israel’s military
What Microsoft had hoped would be a celebratory period has turned into a brutal few days for the company, which is being hit by President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.
nbcnews.com
