Vagrant Gautam

Business meeting is starting at #EMNLP2026. First part that I'll cover is an ominous presentation on "The Conference Crisis" and the first part is about paper integrity.GPTZero was used for citation checks, with manual verification. 267 papers were desk rejected.

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Today in #AIES2026, I will talk about my journey of my PhD. What I did and what I plan to do. I highly value society's and broader community input for my work, so if you wanna chat about surveillance, come by at poster S-100!

I have recently discovered that (ice) hockey is also amazing

I don’t mean this as a criticism of this piece, but this was obvious from the start. If you don’t know anything, AI is a substitute, not a tool. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...

The smallest Australian bird is the *weebill* 😭 Look at its tiny bill!

My godfather turns 90 this year so naturally I decided we needed 90 candles and a carefully-orchestrated plan to light them all simultaneously.

ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy: We are introducing changes in the @ReviewAcl reviewing and submissions. The changes will cap authors and introduce changes in the reviewing to keep our community sustainable. #NLProc #NLP

I think a reasonable position on the OpenAI huggingface thing is: * executing untrusted code is a bad idea * sandboxes frequently aren't, even with the best intentions * novel combinations of untrusted code are being generated at scale and being executed * consequences probably bad

If you thought my last post didn't have enough birds, or enough math, or enough math about birds, I have the post for you. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/08/14/f...

I'm moving to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore to start a new lab! We'll still be dedicated to adversarial QA, human-computer collaboration, probabilistic modeling, and the other fun hijinx my students and I have been up to, but now (hopefully) bigger and better.

Another fun fact: Airport x-ray scanners can damage unused film (worse with film that is unpacked and loaded into your camera, with the new fancy scanners where you don't have to take liquids and big electronics out, and with multiple exposures over longer journeys).

Fun fact I recently re-learned: Python's string capitalize function works by upper-casing the first letter and *lower-casing the rest of the string*. This means "hi this is Vagrant".capitalize() gives you "Hi this is vagrant" and not "Hi this is Vagrant"

Banach-Tarkovsky paradox

I've been unsettled lately when reading messages and papers. It feels like I'm dissociating. Everything seems a bit alien, even if it's completely human. I've had a realization: When our simulations finally exited the Uncanny Valley, they brought the Uncanny with them.

Look, if Italo Calvino had visited Vancouver then Invisible Cities wouldn't be about Venice

I have recently discovered that football is amazing

Thrilled to have been awarded the Association for Computational Linguistics 2016 test of time award for my first ever paper, written with/under the guidance of @dirkhovy.bsky.social A couple of cute things about the paper/its genesis/its outcomes

I am shocked and flattered that this paper won the Best Paper Award (Honourable Mention) at #FAccT2026!

I will be presenting our work titled "Making a Name for Myself: On Academic Naming Policies and their Impact" this week at #FAccT2026. This paper talks about why names matter, why name change policies are important, how people benefit from it and what's still left to do.

I'm looking for a new PhD student to come join me at UAlberta & Amii to study trans perspectives on AI policy & the future of AI as part of my new lab. The position is fully funded and offers access to a range of supports - more details in the poster below!

Attention #NLProc researchers, the EACL 2027 website is officially LIVE: 2027.eacl.org! 🎉 🇬🇷 Join us in Athens, Greece (Mar 9-13, 2027) at #EACL2027 📅 ARR submission deadline: Aug 6, 2026. Open to all areas of CL/NLP + related fields. Stay tuned for the detailed CfP soon!

- Cafe / bookshop / board game bar with generously-sized tables, great coffee and cocktails, and excellent ventilation (sub-700 ppm CO2) - Trans-centred beach - Taxi service where I drive you from A to B without either of us uttering a word besides hi and bye

imagine having a company called AllBirds, pivoting and changing its name to NewBird, and both before and after it's NOT ABOUT BIRDS!!!