Federico Pianzola

We still can’t predict much of anything in biology Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

Biology is much more complicated than most non-biologists can imagine. And AI is not going to change this anytime soon.
blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

I gave a talk today at The Curve on the state of open models.
Here are the slides, recording soon.

Topics include: Chinese ecosystem, reflections on DeepSeek, the demise of Llama, who will fill the U.S. market, what local models do, ATOM project & ai2, and more topics
buff.ly/8BiC67C

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

i looked at the methodology for this and it is
a. sex addiction counseling group in texas did a surveymonkey and extrapolated the results to the entire us population which is the sort of research design that earns you an ff on an intro methods class (the extra f is for extra effort), and
b. p-hacked

TFW a kernel of an idea from 18 months ago becomes reality. I'm so thankful to the magicians in my team.

We have begun to roll out Nabi X in my two courses this semester!

PhD fellowships for start in Spring or Autumn 2026 | CopeNLU Would you like to join our lab as a PhD student in 2026? We have several openings. Read more about reasons to join CopeNLU here. Start in Spring 2026 We have two fully funded 3-year PhD fellowships av...

Looking for PhD opportunites in #NLProc #XAI? We @copenlu.bsky.social @aicentre.dk @apepa.bsky.social are hiring for a start in Spring or Autumn 2026.
📆 Application deadline: 31 October 2025
ℹ️ Details: www.copenlu.com/news/phd-fel...
👀 Reasons to apply: www.copenlu.com/post/why-ucph/

The fanfiction written on a notes app that’s become a bestseller – with a seven-figure film deal SenLinYu’s debut started life as Harry Potter fanfiction. The Alchemised author shares why they were drawn to a war-torn love story, how a conservative upbringing shaped their writing, and the snobber...

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

We are hiring a Project Co-ordinator! 🚨

Are you extremely organised with great interpersonal skills?
Able to multitask efficiently?
Interested in African prehistory?
Keen to work with an enthusiastic team?
We want to hear from you!

Closing date: 17 October, 2025

Slide showing practical tips about how to choose reinforcement learning strategy between PPO, DPO, and GRPO.

Great tips from @jiruiqi.bsky.social about how to choose your reinforcement learning strategy. @gronlp.bsky.social

Interesting position at the intersection of Empirical Literary Studies, Media Psychology, and Machine Translation!

Why Incels Capture Attention: A Cultural Attraction Theory Perspective AUTHORS William Costello and Alberto Acerbi

New preprint!

You may have seen Netflix’s Adolescence. It quickly became their most-watched mini-series ever, even prompting roundtable discussions between writers & the Prime Minister.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings

A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸

How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data.
www.science.org/content/arti...

Did you know we offer free training materials for your own use? 🎓 All materials are collaboratively developed with the research community and are openly available. For instance, our lesson materials about good practices in research software development carpentries-incubator.github.io/good-practic...

Screenshot of the dataset viewer showing a column of marc data + the first few pages of an open access monograph

New @hf.co BigLAM dataset: 9,363 OA books with page images + rich MARC metadata for evaluating (and training) VLMs on metadata extraction.

Libraries are starting to explore AI-assisted cataloguing, but we lack public evaluation data. Hoping this helps fill that gap.

huggingface.co/datasets/big...

VERSEDLE Test your literary knowledge with Versedle!

I made a lil game inspired by the Wordle universe. It's called Versedle (pronounced Verse-a-dle). You guess who wrote famous lines of literature.

As my parents can attest, it's hard! I made them an Easy Mode, but it's still kinda hard. Maybe you'll like it!

▶️ 📚: melaniewalsh.github.io/versedle/

📢 We're hiring a Doctoral Student in Research Software Engineering for Digital Behavioral Data!
Work at the intersection of computer science and social science, develop innovative tools, and pursue your doctoral degree with us.

👉 Apply here: www.gesis.org/en/institute...

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐂 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 (𝐄𝐑𝐂 𝐂𝐨𝐆, 𝐏𝐈 𝐀𝐧𝐚 𝐆𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐟) 𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫! ⁣🎉
⁣
We have an opening for a 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐜 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 in 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 for a starting duration of 12 months extendible to 30 months.⁣

For further details -> www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

The logical structure of experiments lays the foundation for a theory of reproducibility | Royal Society Open Science The scientific reform movement has proposed openness as a potential remedy to the putative reproducibility or replication crisis. However, the conceptual relationship among openness, replication exper...

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

We can use them as we use statistical models. Bootstrap a thousand simulations of text processing and show me what are some robust patterns!

There's a bunch of evidence from cognitive science that LLMs are (were?) quite bad at simulation human behavior, but I think they're still very interesting as tools to model the processing of text, without claiming that this modeling effort aims at approximating human thoughts.

Does anyone have a really good setup for automatically updating their hugo academic publications and CV together?

So who's teaching about the "romantasy" boom? Do you all have favorite scholarly articles or books for understanding/contextualizing this trend?

feminist digital humanities book cover

DARIAH-EU Director Susan Schreibman has co-edited the newly published #OpenAccess book 𝑭𝒆𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒕 𝑫𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒍 𝑯𝒖𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒆𝒔: 𝑰𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝑷𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒆. Co-edited with Lisa Marie Rhody, it explores DH practice as rich terrain for feminist creativity & critique.

➡️ Free access: www.bibliopen.org/9780252048302

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀’ 𝗡𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗼𝗼𝗻! 😍
Here are some photos of our GroNLP station at the Forum, where we welcomed high school classes and potential future researchers. 🧑‍🔬🤖
Quizzes, puzzles, demos, card games, and of course, lots of chocolate! 🍫

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

@sriucl.bsky.social is HIRING 2 permanent Lecturers 🚀 in #QuantitativeSocialScience!

It comes with smart and lovely colleagues🌟, a central London office, and many big ideas and questions 🧐

Apply now! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Registration for #CHR2025 is now open! Visit our website for details on registration fees and how to register: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/venue/

See you in Luxembourg!

Now this is Content

And new paper out: Pleias 1.0: the First Family of Language Models Trained on Fully Open Data

How we train an open everything model on a new pretraining environment with releasable data (Common Corpus) with an open source framework (Nanotron from HuggingFace).

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Image of the Huntr/x trio from Kpop Demon Hunters at a fan event holding up pens, a stack of books for signing in front of them.

Your weekend read! 💓 @bookshop.bsky.social digs into the complicated intersections between the skyrocketing Kpop Demon Hunters fandom vs the (real) K-pop industry & fans.

As always, if you prefer listening, we've got a full audio version along with the text! www.fansplaining.com/articles/kpo...

Extremely important paper for anyone doing Computational Humanities and Computational Social Sciences.

We need to use LLMs as annotators in a more robust way!
The practical recommendations are very useful.

#CHR #CSS #NLProc