Jess Sorrell

@optimistsinc.bsky.social

Assistant prof at JHU CS. Interested in theory of ML, privacy, cryptography. All cat pictures my own and do not represent the cats of my employer

Neural networks are highly non-convex, so approximate error minimizers need not look anything like each other in parameter space. But we show that nevertheless (for many model sizes) approximate error minimizers must closely agree in function/prediction space despite this!

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Do you have recent work on differential privacy? Submit it to TPDP 2026 in Boston, whose deadline is in ~2 weeks. TPDP is a lightly reviewed workshop, whose main purpose is getting researchers in DP together in one place. Dual submissions allowed (and encouraged!).

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Anyone have a favorite proof of Hoeffding's lemma that's more intuitive than applying the AMGM inequality to a term of a Taylor expansion of a function plucked from The Land of It Made Things Work? I'm happy to trade constants for intuition/simplicity

Just wrote my first letter of recommendation for a student 😀. Anyone coming into my replies with, "just wait until the 100th," energy WILL BE BLOCKED, please just let me have this.

Just heard a Roosevelt Institute economist say, "the question of the bad vibes is actually an international question," and I for one am grateful our greatest minds are looking into why, precisely, the vibes have been off (globally) and what we might do about it

We've got a new paper in which we solve Principal/Agent problems without any common prior assumptions. The abstract has some CS Jargon, so I asked ChatGPT to translate it for 1) an economic theorist, 2) a "development economist in a business school", and 3) a bright 3rd grader.

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Tried to go to my visitor office, but it was filled with sleeping undergrads who were all tuckered out from the hackathon that I guess is happening today? I let them rest, but as payment, I am helping myself to some funky fresh GNU stickers, coffee, and snacks #snackathon23

Upper left: a sticker with the GNU gnu and Tux the penguin in superhero gear, flying towards the viewer.

Upper right: a sticker with a pixelated image of "Gnu Emacs" printed on a sink for reasons I'm sure I would understand if I was more hip.

Lower: a Free Software Foundation sticker.

📊 New week, new (bi)weₐᵉkly quiz, and new format! It's been a while! This week, we're looking at NUMBERS, and how to (badly) estimate them! I have written 5 snippets of code, each meant to estimate (via some random🎲sampling) a value. Your goal: figure out which, and why. 1/

A plot showing the simulations for the 5 quantities (5 different plots, each converging, slowly or not, to 5 values).