Johan Ugander

Side benefit of this idea: I can direct prospectives to less established faculty they might not be aware of

📣 Postdocs at Yale FDS! 📣 Tremendous freedom for work on the foundations of data science with faculty across campus, multi-year, great salary. Deadline 11/6. Spread the word! Application: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32396 More about Yale FDS: fds.yale.edu

X's Community Notes are increasingly submitted by AI writers. In a new preprint, X open-sourced its Community Writer tool. A dive into the data underpinning it revealed that in Sept, six AI writers run by X's team wrote 90%+ of all AI-written notes, and 55% of notes that showed up on posts.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams wrote some thoughts about the 3-SUM breakthrough Josh Alman and her wrote an exposition of, how it happened, what it means, and some context about 'what could have been' in a world with more time and fewer models. Read it here: people.csail.mit.edu/virgi/though...

Yale Statistics & Data Science is running an open-rank faculty search (Asst/Assoc/Full), focused on "Applied Data Science". I moved to Yale 2y ago and am very happy here! Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions. Review begins 11/1. statistics.yale.edu/assistantass...

Trump renaming things seems profoundly stupid, and it is. It's also a classic strongman move. Turkmenistan's dictator renamed "April" and "bread" after his mother. Mussolini renamed "bar" and "sandwich" to made-up words so people could tell which bars and paninis were fascist. Much like SpaceXSI.

I've heard a lot of sad voices in our community who are "depressed" and "completely crushed" by the new wave of AI results. I'm actually very optimistic. I don't have particularly good rationales, but emotionally speaking, let me try to infect you with a bit of my optimism if you need it. 1/n

The new call for Motwani postdocs application is now open! tinyurl.com/4r7etua2 BTW- Not quite ready for a postdoc? We updated the TCS Masters programs spreadsheet: tinyurl.com/493rxwkx Any career stage and in the (SF) Bay Area? Save the date for TOCA-SV on 11/6/2026!

In 2023, Change.org integrated an AI-assisted writing tool into their platform. We found that access to the tool changed platform trends in petition text, but that outcomes (signatures and comments) did not improve... Excited that this paper is out, check it out! 🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What is your estimand?

Interested in the social impact of AI? Consider applying for this new post-doc at Duke's Society-Centered AI Initiative: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32805

Need new examples for teaching confounding and reverse causality to my undergrads. Send any published statistical crimes my way please.

My Yale colleague Dan Spielman has started a substack, which I thought I'd signal boost since Dan is an outstanding thinker and communicator (and person!) but isn't on social media much. Here's his first substantive post from a month ago: mathadjacent.com/p/llms-testi...

Nikole Hannah-Jones w/ a sobering follow-up on her decision yrs ago to enroll her daughter in a poor, majority-Black public school rather than a wealthier, whiter private school. You leave heartbroken for the kids being failed by this grossly unequal system. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/m...

The Call for Papers for #STOC2027 is up! Importantly, the PC "will place substantial weight on the quality of exposition, and clarity of technical arguments and proofs" Also: - Public posting requirement - Required video submission and more. Deadline: ⏰ Nov 2, AoE acm-stoc.org/stoc2027/sto...

Setting the doomer bits aside, to me the core challenge here sounds a lot like experimenter demand effects: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_...

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

We're hiring an assistant professor in AI/data science and public policy at Columbia University! For best results apply by Sept 30 apply.interfolio.com/190715

An interesting thing is happening to me at the moment. I have a standing bug bounty policy for my first authored scientific work. That means, I've committed to pay people who report bugs in my code, up to 750€ for severe errors. Since GPT-6 Astra came out, I'm now getting several bug reports daily.

Well, this Navier-Stokes affair did blow up in finite time

Every time.

data colada but for earnings calls

Submissions for CODE@MIT are open until Sept 13th. As @dholtz.bsky.social noted www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... we're particularly interested in these topics this year:

News so big that Donald Trump had to upstage it by renaming Lake Ontario: ethanzuckerman.com/2026/08/27/m... (TL;DR) I will be starting a new lab at McGill University in Montreal next summer as Goldenberg Chair in the Digital Public Sphere.)

📰 Our piece with @ziv-e.bsky.social and @mbernst.bsky.social in The Conversation today. Feed algorithms optimize for engagement behavior because it is easy to measure. The result is that the values amplified in people's feeds are misaligned with what they value. theconversation.com/why-social-m...

Do our social media algorithms correctly reflect our values? Our new article published today in @pnas.org shows that the answer is often not, and that the content that gets promoted into their ranked feeds is often actively counter to our values.

New York City 8th graders choose from 900+ high schools to apply to, in a process that’s spawned Facebook groups and dozens of expensive consulting services. Our new paper shows how application behavior leads to disparities, and how to effectively intervene. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This seems to me a big step forward. I recently "finished" a new paper and put it through refine.ink. I thought the resulting 14 page report was as good as any referee report I have ever got back and it appeared in about 20 minutes. I hope all econometrics (and statistics) journals will follow.

"…there is currently no way for independent researchers to draw truly random samples from TikTok, and it is thus impossible for them to generalize any sample-based findings to the platform as a whole."

Looking forward to giving a tutorial on 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗥𝗮𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗹𝗴𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗺𝘀 with @tiziano.bsky.social at @ic2s2.bsky.social! 🕜 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲: Tuesday, 1-4 pm 📍 𝗟𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Mansfield (210). 🌐 𝗪𝗲𝗯𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲: social-media-ais.github.io/ic2s2-26-tut...

We're excited to be hosting CODE@MIT again this fall! We invite a mix of work involving experimentation — methods, cool experiments, industry reports, etc. Look for more info later on this year's invited speakers.

Principle component analysis

fixed your headline

The next Network Science and Economics Conference NSE-12 will be held at the University of Luxembourg Oct 23-25, 2026! Here is a call for papers (due July 31): www.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/Ca... and the conference series webpage: web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/NS...

Anna Gilbert's commentary on the upcoming First Proof, Part Deux round of AI math proofing evaluations.

This is just to say, I failed to replicate the work, that was not very rigorous, but was in Nature. And which you were probably relying on for grant applications Forgive me, the methods were inappropriate, so vague and so many assumptions.

I will be visiting Yale SOM for AY 2026/2027 The visit includes me teaching an interdisciplinary PhD methods course. If you often experience New Havenness, ask your Dr (advisor) whether "Methods Stumblers" may be right for you.

🚨Maine Primary Forecast 🚨 Polls show the crowded Maine primaries are in a dead heat heading into June 9. But Maine uses ranked-choice voting, and these polls focus only on first choices. Today, my collaborators and I released ranked-choice forecasts. 👇 dliu18.github.io/maine-2026-p...

A love letter to Deep Springs in today's NYT. Seems like a good time to mention: Stephanie and I are very excited to both be teaching short courses there next May-June ("Term 6", 2027).

“@grok is this true” coming to Meta soon

This is a good point: if you will use a machine to write code you don't understand, why does it have to be Python? medium.com/@NMitchem/if...

We are very excited to announce our first workshop on From Theory to Practice: behind the scenes on research deployments at EC’26 (July 6 in Rome)! Call for posters and submissions now open! Organized by myself, @ericachiang.bsky.social , Bailey Flanigan, @brwilder.bsky.social

A post from @wtgowers.bsky.social on math research with reasoning LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT 5.5-Pro). Having similar experiences and agree with his reflections. gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a...

Lots of provocations here, looking forward to reading. Its a brave new world for social science! I'm optimisic about automating the "boring parts" of research, but pessimistic about implications of the deluge of slop (its bad enough already). Two threads I find interesting re agentic research:

What can we learn from automating an entire quantitative social science paper, from prompt to finished product? Thread about ongoing work with @natewilmers.bsky.social 1/12 Paper: osf.io/preprints/so...

I'm at MIT tomorrow, Monday, giving the Sloan OM Seminar, 11:45a–1p. Talking about recent work on causal inference under "structured" interference w/ Kevin Han and Shuangning Li. MIT folks, come say hi!

“We have many years of experience picking apart the work of the world’s best security researchers, and Mythos Preview is every bit as capable. So far we’ve found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can’t.”