Vishal Misra

Who Pays for Tariffs? An Updated Analysis for 2025 | by Vishal Misra | Aug, 2025 | Medium Building on our 2019 analysis of Trump-era China tariffs, with renewed relevance as tariff policies expand globally

I wrote an updated analysis on tariffs for 2025 - important clarifications on who actually pays for it. The methodology is synthetic control

medium.com/@vishalmisra...

A look back at the fractal modeling craze of the ‘90s, why it fell short, and what Internet traffic actually looks like: layered, stochastic, human.
https://medium.com/@vishalmisra/fractals-fables-and-the-nature-of-internet-traffic-81ed2d736eae

Sometimes it’s just layers, not fractals.

I’ve spent the last 20+ years accidentally building things that turned out to be right.

Live sports on the web. Control theory for TCP. Net neutrality. RAG.

Wrote up 5 of those stories here:
https://medium.com/@vishalmisra/five-ideas-that-were-early-but-turned-out-to-be-right-d6f51ab09574

Next time I go to a restaurant instead of paying the bill in cash I will teach them a class on stochastic differential equations.

To get rid of the trade imbalance.

New research: Cluster Synthetic Control (ClusterSC) addresses the curse of dimensionality in causal inference with large datasets (AISTATS 2025).
Blog: https://medium.com/@vishalmisra/a-smarter-way-to-compare-apples-to-apples-how-cluster-synthetic-control-improves-causal-inference-d8684dce6abc

Some people buy Teslas, I buy tomatoes

Lecture Series in AI: Ion Stoica, UC Berkeley Tickets, Fri, Mar 28, 2025 at 10:30 AM | Eventbrite Eventbrite - Columbia Engineering presents Lecture Series in AI: Ion Stoica, UC Berkeley - Friday, March 28, 2025 at Davis Auditorium, 412 Schapiro CEPSR, New York, NY. Find event and ticket information.

The next distinguished lecture in AI organized by @CUSEAS is on 3/28 by Ion Stoica - a legendary researcher and entrepreneur. Here is the registration link for the talk

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lecture-series-in-ai-ion-stoica-uc-berkeley-tickets-1277915703269

Looking forward to you visit Ion!

This is pitch perfect by Dr. Katrina Armstrong, our President and leader. She speaks to all our values.

SHSAT results came out and our son joins our daughter for high school at Bronx Science. I told them no pressure but it’d be nice if they can add to this list of 9 Nobel Prize winners from Bronx Science.

No pressure.

Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize. The public square is turning into a grotesque idiocracy

A must read on what’s happening in that other place

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/liberals-only-censor-musk-seeks-to

America’s loss, China’s gain: top Chinese universities welcome PhD refugees from the US | South China Morning Post As the US cuts funding and suspends graduate admissions, China’s leading educational institutions are offering new academic pathways.

Well isn’t this fantastic

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3299395/americas-loss-chinas-gain-top-chinese-universities-welcome-phd-refugees-us

Yesterday’s announcement of funding cuts makes us more committed than ever in supporting our students, our
faculty, and our research mission. @Columbia has a reputation for being one of the most important and influential research institutes in the world and it will continue.

Mumbai Tech Week was a fantastic event - had the pleasure of speaking on both days. Once with Amit Sharma - the CTO of Dream Sports on the Columbia Dream Sports AI Innovation Center - #MumbAI

On Day 1 of Mumbai Tech Week. Appearing on a panel on all things AI moderated by Varun Mayya with Niki Parmar (co-inventor of the transformer) and Siddharth Srinivasan, head of Eleven Labs India. #MumbAI

EXCLUSIVE: Trump Administration Cancels $400 Million in Grants to Columbia The cuts are “only the beginning,” according to Trump’s antisemitism task force.

Aaaand here we go

https://www.thefp.com/p/exclusive-trump-administration-cancels

Found this on my college WhatsApp group. At least I have been consistent with my views!

My first time at AAAI - giving an invited talk on “Large Language Models as Approximate Bayesian Learners: A Unified View”

Joint work with Naman Agarwal and Siddhartha Dalal

Thanks B Ravi from IITM gfor the invitation!

Key insight: LLMs encode algorithmic reasoning during training. Chain-of-thought prompting isn't 'teaching' new skills—it's triggering existing computational pathways. DeepSeek's (and similar) approaches made these pathways the default, while others require explicit activation

TokenProbe visualization shows how prompting unlocks these 'latent algorithms': When asked to solve 33×117 directly, tokens show uncertainty (lighter green). But prompt for step-by-step, and high-confidence tokens (green) reveal systematic computation emerging.

A simple experiment in arithmetic on our tool TokenProbe reveals the power of inference time scaling in LLMs: Given '33×117', token probabilities show uncertain guessing for direct computation, but near-certainty for each step when solving methodically.

The second COVID election. The 2024 Election: What Really Moved… | by Vishal Misra | Medium The 2024 Election: What Really Moved the Needle

Nobody voted for DOGE. People certainly didn’t vote for the Middle East Rivera. There is considerable evidence that it was, in fact, the price of eggs that drove the outcome and the Harris campaign nearly overcame that.

https://medium.com/@vishalmisra/thoughts-on-the-2024-us-elections-a228086d9fba

Two words instantly doubled shampoo sales: Rinse, Repeat

Four words have quadrupled Kumbh business: Once in 144 years

This is what genius marketing looks like.

Because this is getting downplayed in some of the coverage, the racist staffer DOGE rehired isn’t a case of “stupid things he wrote years ago as a teen.” He posted about how we should “normalize Indian hate” IN SEPTEMBER.

What are the best books on how democracies fail?

We all like to yell at the Democrats, but it’s really Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune who are letting Elon Musk and his faceless goon squad make a mockery of their power as leaders of a coequal branch without uttering a peep or lifting a finger.

Sunny G was making the point over and over again how Abhishek Sharma’s innings was full of classical strokes - and the evidence bears out. Almost all in the V - no “reverse” or “scoop” anythings

Dean Shih-Fu Chang and Vice Dean @vishalmisra.bsky.social discuss the future of #AI in education as a part of the Winter 2025 issue of Columbia Engineering Magazine.

Read their conversation: bit.ly/40FIhCa

@columbiauniversity.bsky.social
#ColumbiaEngineering #E4H

My thoughts on DeepSeek sent to a reporter asking for comments

Drafting the Blueprint for AI at Columbia Engineering | Columbia Engineering In this conversation, Dean Shih-Fu Chang and Vice Dean Vishal Misra discuss how the School is driving and responding to this exciting moment in the development of artificial intelligence.

AI at Columbia Engineering https://www.engineering.columbia.edu/about/magazine/winter25/artificial-intelligence/drafting-blueprint-ai-columbia-engineering

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