Sachita Nishal (on the job market!)

thank you! this is really cool and would be nice to learn about if you're planning to expand the scope of taxonomy(e.g., other scientists, grad students)

Training LLMs end to end is hard. But way more people should, and will, be doing it in the future.

The @hf.co Research team is excited to share their new e-book that covers the full pipeline:
· pre-training,
· post-training,
· infra.

200+ pages of what worked and what didn’t. ⤵️

Giallo Using a vision language model to analyze Italian Giallo films

Halloween blog post: Italian Giallo Horror Films

thisismattmiller.com/post/giallo/

- Using vision language model to analyze a 70 film corpus (🧟) / 80,000 frames
- Build and plot “trope clusters” across movies

Probably the longest eye acting supercut you've seen: youtu.be/cGrmkOwut6k

A rectangular Northwestern University flyer titled “Call for Study Participants.” The top banner is pink with bold black text reading “CALL FOR STUDY PARTICIPANTS.” Below it, highlighted in yellow, is the question: “Are you a journalist writing about technology and/or computing?” The flyer explains that researchers at Northwestern University are seeking professional journalists who cover technology or related topics, write news in English, and are based in the U.S. to participate in an online study. The study involves using a tool for two weeks, providing feedback, and receiving $100 compensation (IRB Study #STU00224608). It includes a yellow box that says “Fill out our eligibility form if you’re interested!” with the link https://tinyurl.com/newscompass and contact emails: Nick Diakopoulos (nad@northwestern.edu) and Sachita Nishal (nishal@u.northwestern.edu). The Northwestern University seal appears in the top-right corner.

📣 Attention science + tech journalists!

Trying to keep up with the flood of research papers that come out every day? Attempting to track what research has already been covered by others, and what may benefit from deeper exploration?

You are invited to participate in our research study!

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Please join our 2-week online study to help us evaluate this tool: tinyurl.com/newscompass

Contact @ndiakopoulos.bsky.social or me on here or via email with any questions you may have!

#ScienceJournalism #TechJournalism #Journalism #NewsDiscovery #ScienceWriting

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We're researchers at Northwestern University
@nuschoolofcomm.bsky.social developing a tool to help journalists navigate the landscape of tech/computing research papers + their news and social media coverage, to discover newsworthy stories and fresh angles (IRB Study # STU00224608)!

[2/3]

A rectangular Northwestern University flyer titled “Call for Study Participants.” The top banner is pink with bold black text reading “CALL FOR STUDY PARTICIPANTS.” Below it, highlighted in yellow, is the question: “Are you a journalist writing about technology and/or computing?” The flyer explains that researchers at Northwestern University are seeking professional journalists who cover technology or related topics, write news in English, and are based in the U.S. to participate in an online study. The study involves using a tool for two weeks, providing feedback, and receiving $100 compensation (IRB Study #STU00224608). It includes a yellow box that says “Fill out our eligibility form if you’re interested!” with the link https://tinyurl.com/newscompass and contact emails: Nick Diakopoulos (nad@northwestern.edu) and Sachita Nishal (nishal@u.northwestern.edu). The Northwestern University seal appears in the top-right corner.

📣 Attention science + tech journalists!

Trying to keep up with the flood of research papers that come out every day? Attempting to track what research has already been covered by others, and what may benefit from deeper exploration?

You are invited to participate in our research study!

[1/3]

All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity Finding working copies of the last few titles was an “especially cursed” journey.

One of the coolest video game preservation stories I have ever covered arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/...

Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism? The grim calculations involved in publishing traditional written reviews.

“Editing according to traffic is not editing; it’s engineering,”

nymag.com/intelligence...

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar?

Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly.

A few examples in thread ↴

Check out the camera-ready version of our ACL Findings paper ("Taxonomizing Representational Harms using Speech Act Theory") to learn more!!! arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00928

CONGRATULATIONS!!!🥳

columnar joints in a japanese waterfall. these are rocks carved out when water eroded through the cooled lava.

happy birthday! it is also my birthday! here is a photo of columnar joints in a japanese waterfall that I saw last week--rocks formed when water cut through the cooled lava from a volcano!

1. On Saturday, @mnlee.bsky.social will present our work on designing for agency in LLM-infused writing support tools for journalists at the Tools for Thought workshop.

Lead author @sachnishal.bsky.social will be nearby at her own workshop on news + HCI!

ai-tools-for-thought.github.io/workshop/

sometimes when i'm writing a sentence i really like it feels like i'm playing the piano

Remember this @neuripsconf.bsky.social workshop paper? We spent the past month writing a newer, better, longer version!!! You can find it online here: arxiv.org/abs/2502.00561

Screenshot of Google docs generative AI agent asking me to Rephrase, Shorten, Elaborate, More formal.

Holy moly. I'm trying to write an academic paper, and nearly every application I'm using is not only offering Generative AI as an option for writing, but *pushing it* -- pervading the design to the point where a simple misclick would make my content AI-generated. Here's why that's a problem. 🧵

News Futures @ CHI 2025 Welcome to the News Futures Workshop @ CHI 2025! The ways in which news is produced and consumed is constantly reshaped by technological change—today, this takes the form of AI integration in newsroom...

Incredibly amped to co-organize this #CHI2025 workshop on the future of news and HCI 📰📺🌐 Join us in exploring how HCI can support the production, verification and dissemination of trustworthy news in a changing world!

🔗 Details: sites.google.com/view/newsfut...
⏳ Deadline: Feb 20, 2025 (AoE)

By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. Over 150 of these, including “Ambient Relaxation,” “Deep Focus,” “100% Lounge,” “Bossa Nova Dinner,” “Cocktail Jazz,” “Deep Sleep,” “Morning Stretch,” and “Detox,” were nearly entirely made up of PFC.

can connect playlists meant to deliver indifferent content (e.g. "bossa nova dinner") to the spurious AI-generated genres individualized for each user in Spotify Wrapped; these "genres" have no social meaning and can't be learned or shared, only experienced through more streaming

It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performance Progress in NLP is increasingly measured through benchmarks; hence, contextualizing progress requires understanding when and why practitioners may disagree about the validity of benchmarks. We develop...

Seeing cool works on metrology and measurement modeling for NLP!

So I wanted to port over the thread our ACL 2023 Findings paper (arxiv.org/abs/2305.09022) on conceptualizations of NLP tasks and measurements of performance! Work with Eric Yuan, @haldaume3.bsky.social, and Su Lin Blodgett. (1/n)

was mildly obsessed with this genre of ad all summer and took a bunch of photos for giggles. I feel they exemplify well this idea of "AI as floating signifier" from Suchman (2023), since they "suggest[s] a specific referent but work[s] to escape definition in order to maximize its suggestive power"

Feel like "fix the motion smoothing" should be replaced by "explain that ChatGPT isn't a search engine" when going home for the holidays now

Photo shows a sheet of US postage stamps each printed with an identical portrait of the writer Ursula K LeGuin.

PSA, your local post office probably has Ursula K LeGuin stamps or you can order them by mail.

I understand—thank you for taking the time to explain, this is really insightful!

I understand! do you find that companies try to automate that junior work away, or is it something different? your initial post brought to mind the writers strike from last year and companies wanting writers to edit AI-generated first drafts and such, wondering if there are parallels in games?

hi! would you be open to speculating or sharing resources on why junior roles have become so rare in video games? I’ve heard of similar concerns about junior/trainee in other creative domains and am trying to get a sense of what drives this shift?

The Premature Death of Physical Media — and the Cult Home Video Labels Keeping It Alive Matt Desiderio isn’t sure how he feels about me taking photos of his movie collection. It’s not that he isn’t proud of it — quite the contrary. Falling off the shelves in his living room, carrying ove...

This, from 2015, was another longread for Flavorwire, on the importance of physical media. Another ongoing hobby horse of mine! I've really just been writing and yelling about the same things for a decade!! www.flavorwire.com/535883/the-p...