Upol Ehsan | hiring PhD students Fall'26

Peak academic mood: ghosting Nobel Prize for solitude.

✨ The real prize was peace.

Academics after a paper deadline.

#academicSky

It is eye opening to see the same CS conference venues loudly talking about "accessibility" and "allyship" are forcing people to travel (regardless of visa/health issues) and banning hybrid efforts.

We need to stop pretending brilliant science comes from brilliant minds working brilliantly at all times. Most of the stuff in academia is this unglamorous persistence from people who keep showing up.

7/7
n=7
#academicSky #mentalHealth #grit

If you're in the fog: Try the smallest possible "show up" today. 🌱
If you know someone struggling: Check on your people.

💪 Because sometimes the gap between "almost didn't exist" and "submitted to CHI" is just... showing up.

6/n

Three things that saved me:
📍 Lower the bar, keep the rhythm. Two sentences > zero.
🤗 Lean on kind collaborators. Let people be your structure.
📈 Trust the compound effect. Small deposits add up.

5/n

When the fog lifted, the scaffolding was there: notes, drafts, momentum. The paper had been writing itself in the margins while I survived. 🔥

💡 Discipline isn't about peak performance. It's self-love for your future self: showing up today so they have something to build on tomorrow.

4/n

🛠️ I assembled a small team. Came to meetings even when I didn't feel like it. Some days I wrote two sentences. Some days I just listened. But I stayed in the room.

Here's what showing up bought me:...

3/n

Between global (funding crises) & personal (multiple rounds of racial abuse) challenges, my tank was low. 😔

⚡️ So I did the only thing I could: I showed up. Not heroically. Not with perfect focus. Just... present.

🛠️ I assembled a small team. Came to meetings even when...

2/n

⚠️ The #CHI2026 paper I submitted? It almost didn't exist. That's the BTS part academics never post. So I will…to normalize what I call unglamorous persistence.

This summer was one of my hardest, mentally. 🌥️ Between ...
1/n

In a time when academia is under siege, it is worth pausing to remember:
This is why many of us stay. For the joy of making meaning with people who make us feel seen.

I hope you get to hold onto your people...and build things that matter, with them.

6/6
N=6

There’s something profoundly meaningful about building with people who have seen you across life stages... the broke TA years, the first conference nerves, the paper rejections and wins. That continuity is a gift. 🌱

5/n

🌍 Hard to imagine all of us as faculty and professionals in different places across the world. We grew up a little. But the joy was still there.

Here’s what this reminded me:

- Brilliance in academia is often common.
-Kindness is not.
-And I would take kindness any day.

4/n

Paper-writing became our excuse to hang out.

📊 Here's how our sessions went: 60% laughter and inside jokes. 40% deep work. 100% joy. Same hilarious banter. Same goofiness. But maybe with a bit more gray in our hair, and maybe more side chats about health than caffeine hacks. 🩺

3/n

🎁 This summer, I invited friends from my grad school days to write a paper. It was the right team --- the kind where there's enough brainpower and chemistry to make any project sparkle.

✨ But the real reason? I missed them. Turns out, they missed me too.

2/n

🎉 Post-CHI submission reflection: Yes, academia has its mess. But amidst all that, there's one joy I keep coming back to...building something meaningful with people you truly love working with.

This summer....

1/n
#academicsky #chi2026 #collaboration

'Tis that time of the year, homies. May your contributions be accepted by the grumpy R2s

#academicSky #chi2026

Tried something new today.

Gave quick nods to everyone wearing a respirator at the airport.

Almost everyone nodded back. A few even gestured to the respirator.

A quick "I see you homie" moment.

People understood the assignment y'all.

#ReleaseTheCuomoList

gpt5 writes like it considers mayonnaise is spicy.

and considers salt and pepper as spices.

Homies, you aren't getting it.

The math isn't wrong.

It's just GPT-5 being "PhD level"

[Pls repost] Hi folks, do you have any templates for reasonable accommodations letters written by your provider/doc for Long Covid?

I'm collecting samples to help the broader community, esp those who are underserved.

If you feel comfortable sharing, it will help a lot of people.

DMs open.

The Onion used to make jokes.
Now it does academic ethnography.

2️⃣ Audit for agency leakage:
Implement checks that flag when language oversells cognition and feed those signals into eval and procurement pipelines.

3️⃣ Localize the “mind”:
In Majority World settings, pair cautious tone with localized knowledge grounding so fluency does not paper over epistemic gaps

Takeaways for Responsible AI:

1️⃣ Design out miscues:
Prevent C-expressions in sensitive applications.
Use tone constraints and capability disclaimers to fight unearned trust.

Reflections:
⚠️ We are building interfaces that invite over-trust. “C-expressions” + anthropomorphic branding = safety debt waiting to mature.

⚖️ The real risk isn’t whether LLMs are sentient; it’s that people think they are, and then absolve responsibility when things go wrong.

3️⃣ Theory-of-Mind misfires at scale
When LLMs speak fluently, our brains project beliefs and goals.
But LLMs do not “believe”... they autocomplete.

🚨 That delta between performance and cognition creates false agency perception, creating room for irresponsible AI.

2️⃣ Verbal uncanny valley is real
Unsettling mismatch: humanlike language + inhuman reasoning = a new flavor of uncanny valley (no creepy avatars needed). This has UI, trust calibration, and regulatory implications.

Findings (worthy of my time)

1️⃣ “C-expressions” ≠ consciousness
Phrases like “I panicked” or “I feel” trigger reflexive mind-ascription, but they’re linguistic hallucinations, not signs of sentience. These cues silently build user trust without grounding in system capacity.

The psychology of LLM interactions: the uncanny valley and other minds Through their ability to converse in a human-like fashion, large language models (LLMs) have underscored the need to revisit our definitions of consciousness, and how we know if someone who claims ...

🧠 LLMs don’t think; they 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 thinking. Treating performance as proof is how we fall into the 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐲 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐲.

Enjoyed reading this paper: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Findings from the paper that were worth my time, reflections, and takeaways ↓