The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality. And trans lives are grounded in reality. We see y'all. No matter what. www.popsci.com/science/tran...

First-of-a-kind study shows encouraging data for trans kids who socially transition

Ninety-four percent of participants in a new study stood firm in their trans identity after five years, and "detransitioning" is rare.

popsci.com

Looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues in Edmonton this week for AIIDE! I'll be trying my hand at live tweeting the paper sessions at both the main conference and EXAG/INT, which I'll try to keep in this big reply thread (starting off tomorrow). @aiide.bsky.social @exag.bsky.social

I'm pleased to announce that Shadab Choudhury & Asha Kumar's paper "Evaluating Human-LLM Representation Alignment: A Case Study on Affective Sentence Generation for Augmentative and Alternative Communication" has been accepted to IJCNLP-AACL Findings 2025! arxiv.org/abs/2503.11881 #AACL2025 #IJCNLP

Evaluating Human-LLM Representation Alignment: A Case Study on Affective Sentence Generation for Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Gaps arise between a language model's use of concepts and people's expectations. This gap is critical when LLMs generate text to help people communicate via Augmentative and Alternative Communication ...

arxiv.org

There is one week left to apply to join us at Rutgers! We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Sociology as part of a cluster of new hires in data science and AI. Applications are due next Wednesday, 10/15.

Thrilled to announce that my lab has had two papers accepted to the Wordplay Workshop at EMNLP 2025!!

Congratulations to the winners of the Commonsense Personal Grounded Dialogue Challenge! discourse.aicrowd.com/t/winners-ca... we look forward to hearing about the details of your systems at the EMNLP 2025 Wordplay Workshop!

🏆 Winners & Call for Paper

Hello all, Thank you for being part of the Commonsense Persona Grounded Dialogue Challenge 2025! Whether you finished at the top or joined for the first time, we’re glad you participated in this seco...

discourse.aicrowd.com

Hidden Door is an AI storytelling game that actually makes sense

Hidden Door is an AI storytelling game that actually makes sense

You’ll help write what happens next.

buff.ly

Submission deadline has been extended to September 12th! Everyone tell your friends! Submit your paper to this awesome workshop! wordplay-workshop.github.io

Lara J. Martin@laramartin.net · last yr.

The CFP for the Wordplay Workshop at #EMNLP2025 is out! We welcome any work that sits at the intersection of #NLP and games/narrative. We are looking for regular papers (4-8 pgs) and extended abstracts about open challenges in the space (2 pgs) Papers due: August 29 wordplay-workshop.github.io/cfp/

The CFP for the Wordplay Workshop at #EMNLP2025 is out! We welcome any work that sits at the intersection of #NLP and games/narrative. We are looking for regular papers (4-8 pgs) and extended abstracts about open challenges in the space (2 pgs) Papers due: August 29 wordplay-workshop.github.io/cfp/

US President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 calls for unprecedented cuts to scientific agencies that, if enacted, would deal a devastating blow to US science, policy specialists say. https://go.nature.com/4jYv3IP

Trump proposes unprecedented budget cuts to US science

Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and the scientific pipeline, critics say.

go.nature.com

every definition and description of "AI Slop" reads to me as what for-profit, highly metricized, and algorithmic platforms have always done. making it primarily an "AI" issue lets the platforms and this general logic too much off the hook imo

Roland Meyer@bildoperationen.bsky.social · last yr.

«Monetized ‹brainrot› reels is generative AI’s killer app; this type of content is how people are making money with AI ...» Platform capitalism has created the infrastructural conditions for a globalized grifter economy, now genAI is giving them the means to produce content as SPAM on scale 1/

What data is he pulling this from? because back when people were using Facebook, people would have 100+ "friends" on average. 😂

Drew Harwell@drewharwell.com · last yr.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's chatbots will supplement your real friends: "The average American has fewer than 3 friends ... but has demand for ... 15 friends" (h/t x.com/romanhelmetg...)

This is one of the worst violations of research ethics I've ever seen. Manipulating people in online communities using deception, without consent, is not "low risk" and, as evidenced by the discourse in this Reddit post, resulted in harm. Great thread from Sarah, and I have additional thoughts. 🧵

Sarah Gilbert@sarahagilbert.bsky.social · last yr.

The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988

A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context* Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when An LLM just generates text

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · last yr.

Some of the anti-AI stuff feels a bit like when people would say "don't use Wikipedia as a source." It's just like anything else, a piece of information that you weigh against multiple sources and your own understanding of its likely failure modes

ATTENTION: NSF GRANT RECIPIENTS We received a heads up from a trusted source that you should proactively download/print/screen shot any documentation on research.gov pertaining to your NSF awards, both those that are current and any that have closed in the last 5-6 years. 1/n

a cartoon of a man holding a frying pan and a spoon with red alert written above him

ALT: a cartoon of a man holding a frying pan and a spoon with red alert written above him

media.tenor.com

Northwestern just announced that the university will meet the funding needs of any research that is being impacted by stop orders. LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOO! #edusky #academicsky wgntv.com/evanston/nor...

Northwestern University to self-fund research despite Trump administration freeze

While university officials said they’ve still not received official word of such action, they acknowledged receiving about 100 stop-work orders from the federal government on roughly 100 fede…

wgntv.com

My NSF CS for All grant was just terminated (www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...). Nationwide, we were: • Improving the quantity + quality of K-12 CS teachers • Ensuring the sustainability of K-12 CS teacher prep programs • Ensuring all youth in the U.S. have access to great CS teachers

Can confirm that my NSF grant "How False Beliefs Form & How to Correct Them" was cancelled today because it is "not in alignment with current NSF priorities" Shocking that understanding how people are misled by false information is now a forbidden topic. Our work will continue but at a smaller scale

Rebekah Tromble@rebekahtromble.bsky.social · last yr.

NSF has posted an “update on priorities.” They’re canceling all “DEI and misinformation/disinformation” grants. And the guidance on how to fulfill the longstanding, legally mandated Broadening Participation requirement is utterly incoherent. www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p...

I love how you can have an overview of the internet in 1995 by... looking in a book that lists 8,000+ websites with photos lol

I really love this idea that venture capitalists and tech companies are just doing reinforcement learning IRL: "With access to infinite resources, these adherents ran reinforcement learning on their companies. They threw billions of dollars' worth of spaghetti at the wall until something stuck."

Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · last yr.

What if instead of The Terminator and The Matrix, we used Severance and South Park to think about AI?

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

David D. Levine@daviddlevine.com · last yr.

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

The bipartisan belief that America would be a better place if *other people* worked in a factory. www.ft.com/content/8459...

I am *horrified* by Sam Altman's suggestion that ethical AI limits can be gathered through AI itself being used to scale out having conversations with hundreds of millions of human users of OpenAI products and it being a matter of majority consensus mediated through his machine. Ethics is a field!

'Bluesky has overtaken its flailing rival X in hosting posts related to new academic research, indicating the platform is fast becoming the go-to place for scholars to share their work.'

X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research

Data indicates more scholars turning to alternative social media site to post about their work after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover

timeshighereducation.com

Reminder that for two more days @assistiveware.bsky.social is offering a 50% discount on your favorite AssistiveWare apps like the symbol/text-to-speech of Proloquo2Go. Sale ends April 9. www.assistiveware.com/aac-app-sale #AutismAcceptanceMonth

Autism Acceptance Month Sale 2025 - AssistiveWare

Everyone has something to say. Working closely with the AAC community, we build apps and share best practice to help you communicate with the world.

assistiveware.com

The resolution is on the desk of Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway as we speak. If you think he should move forward with it, drop him a note at president at rutgers dot edu to say so. Anyone with an interest should write! And that goes double for Rutgers alums + affiliates!!

Michael Yarbrough (he/him)@mwyarbrough.bsky.social · last yr.

This exciting resolution from Rutgers University Senate is exactly the kind of model I think higher ed needs: a mutual defense pact of, in this case, Big 10 schools. They call for member institutions to create a joint defense fund and make resources available to any member institution under attack.

It's almost as if the US values sports more than art...

Brian Box Brown@boxbrown.bsky.social · last yr.

why is no one forcing AI sports onto us? is it bc no one would care about sports without humans’ inherent flaws? This is the same reason ai “art” doesnt work

Petabytes of critical government research that is marked for possible deletion cannot be archived because of technical and legal restrictions, meaning it is very likely to be lost forever: www.404media.co/nih-archives...

Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer's Research Could Be Lost Forever

Days before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that 10,000 HHS staffers would lose their jobs, a message appeared on NIH research repository sites saying they were "under review."

404media.co

Almost universally the handful of factories that remain in the US that make clothes rely on immigrant labor which we're deporting. And making clothes is a *skill*. There's no shortcuts beyond hours behind a machine.

New Jersey is just stepping up left and right

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com · last yr.

Relatedly: University President Christopher Eisgruber signaled that Princeton would not make concessions to the federal government in an interview with Bloomberg after news broke that the Trump administration had suspended dozens of the University’s research grants.