📢 Woot! Congrats to Sarmad, Sharaf, and @ethankutlu.bsky.social for this years' ICWSM's best paper! For those who weren't there for the actual talk. (A while back) I had a made an explainer youtu.be/QRBiv84Aaak

Flattening Fantasies: Analyzing Stereotypes in Pornographic Discourse.

YouTube video by Osama Khalid

youtu.be

@icwsm.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Congrats to the winners of this year's best paper, best dataset paper, best poster paper, and best Web Agent demo/poster 🎉 #ICWSM2026

I am currently at @icwsm.bsky.social . We (Sarmad, Sharaf, @ethankutlu.bsky.social ) will be presenting our paper "Flattening Fantasies: Analysing Stereotypes in Pornographic Discourse" in the 4:00-5:00 session . Come say Hi! (It just won the best paper award)

🚨 I am functionally iliterate when it comes to Urdu on the internet. So I made a couple of web extensions to render Urdu text into Nastaliq, to help readability For Chrome: chromewebstore.google.com/detail/osama... and Firefox: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo...

Iowa City, a role model! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/c... (archive.ph/lEmzI)

Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the Air.

nytimes.com

🚨 Weekend Project: I finally finished a small project I've been working on. A web extension to solve my personal language learning problem! www.youtube.com/shorts/XsAdZ... 1/n

Word Saver: An Illustrative Demo (Short)

YouTube video by Osama Khalid

youtube.com

ProPublica spoke to about 150 people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.” We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words. ➡️ This is what they wrote: projects.propublica.org/impact-of-ho...

"When the public discourse focuses on whether chatbots have consciousness, we're not talking about documented harms like privacy violations, algorithmic bias... The fake risk of sentient AI provides perfect cover for ignoring real risks that affect real people today" www.readtpa.com/p/stop-prete...

Stop Pretending Chatbots Have Feelings: Media's Dangerous AI Anthropomorphism Problem

When AI causes harm, headlines blame the bot instead of the billion-dollar companies that built them. This anthropomorphic coverage is tech journalism at its worst.

readtpa.com

Swahili’s long history as a ‘language on the road’ has traversed 19th-century trade routes, entered 20th-century classrooms, carried Julius Nyerere on his political ‘safaris’, and forged connections across Africa. www.historytoday.com/archive/behi...

Swahili on the Road

historytoday.com

🚨 Weekend project: Urdu Audiobook Generation: youtube.com/watch?v=PYrO... Urdu is generally considered a low-resource language[1], and there isn't enough training data to build high-quality systems. I wanted to explore how far I can push TTS (text-to-speech) in Urdu. 1/3

letterformarchive.org/news/this-ju... Chopstick sleeves can be both functional and cultural artifacts.

This Just In: Chopstick Sleeves as Emissaries of Japanese Typography and Culture

Designer and educator Angie Wang deciphers a collection of over 500 sleeves recently donated to the Archive.

letterformarchive.org

Since the Chagos Islands are back in the news. www.bbc.com/news/article... On the issue with domain names (e.g. .io , .tv, .nu) and digital colonialism www.wired.com/story/the-di... Archived: archive.ph/im6HN

The Digital Colonialism Behind .tv and .ly

Country-specific domain names can generate a lot of money—but for whom?

wired.com

Among the many applications of stylometry... weaponizing language (or any technology) as a tool of prosecution always leaves a bad taste in my mouth www.thedial.world/articles/new...

Can a Comma Solve a Crime? — The Dial

How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.

thedial.world

Executions of the conceivably innocent are no better than human sacrifice latimes.com/opinion/stor... "When we kill the guilty, we become needlessly cruel. When we kill the conceivably innocent, we become a mockery of ourselves and our supposed allegiance to justice."

Editorial: Executions of the conceivably innocent are no better than human sacrifice

On Friday, North Carolina executed Freddie Owens, even after serious doubts about his guilt emerged. When we kill the conceivably innocent, we become a mockery of ourselves and our supposed allegiance...

latimes.com

Thats it! I am leaving academia and becoming a YouTuber!

📢 Osama Khalid (osamakhalid.bsky.social) will defend his doctoral thesis "Charting Sensorial Style: New Frontiers in Linguistic Style Analysis" tomorrow Wednesday 11/20 at 10:15am in 2520C UCC. Deets at bit.ly/khalid_11_20 #FinalExam #PhDLife #UIowaGrad24 #AcademicSky #stylometry #linguistics 👨‍🎓 🤞

Did you know ى is more likely to occur at the end of a word than at the start. There are more words which start with م than there are words that end with it. Used Python+MATLAB+MSPaint to visualize how the letters in the #Urdu language are distributed within words.

What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase? TitleCase devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/...

What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase? - The Old New Thing

It has one foot in each world but belongs to neither.

devblogs.microsoft.com