Shakir Mohamed

Your #FAccT2025 General Chairs @sciorestis.bsky.social, @metaxa.net, and I, reporting from the venue.

We're looking forward to welcoming you to the Athens Conservatoire or online!

We are at #facct2025 in Athens and discussing the latest research in building safe, fair and accountable AI technologies. 🚀🚀

Just 5 days left for the abstract submission deadline for @facct.bsky.social 😱 A slow trickle of submissions coming in and can’t wait to see the full set. good luck to everyone writing and planning to submit 🤞🏽🚀

🎄 Merry Christmas! 🎄

🔔 As Advent ends, the 12 Days of Christmas🎄begin!

Join me for a deeper dive into the initiatives shown in this map - from Data Science Africa to @ai.cam.ac.uk - as we explore practical responses to AI challenges.

the-atomic-human.ai/reflections/...

Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty Women faculty are more likely to leave their jobs than men, most often due to workplace climate, rather than work-life balance.

Women leave academia at higher rates than men at every career stage, and attrition is especially high among three groups: tenured faculty, women in non-STEM fields, and women employed at less prestigious institutions, a #ScienceAdvances analysis finds.

Research scholar program Overview

Here’s the page with the eligibility and other details. research.google/programs-and...

Deadline for faculty research grants up to $60k is 27 Jan! “The Research Scholar Program provides unrestricted gifts to support research at institutions around the world, and is focused on funding world-class research conducted by early-career professors”
google.submittable.com/submit/ac6d7...

📢 ICML Call for Papers is out
The CfP is live here: icml.cc/Conferences/..., and we also just released a blog post summarizing major updates this year: medium.com/@icml2025pc/...

Feasibility test of per-flight contrail avoidance in commercial aviation - Communications Engineering Vapour trails (contrails) from aircraft make a substantial contribution to aviation’s climate impact. Here we execute a per-flight contrail avoidance feasibility test through altitude adjustments base...

"Contrails, formed by aircraft engines, are a major component of aviation’s impact on anthropogenic climate change. [...] This study demonstrates that per-flight detectable contrail avoidance is feasible in commercial aviation." www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Reminder: The #FAccT2025 submission deadlines are roughly one month away! Abstracts are due January 15th and full papers on January 22nd. See the full CfP here: facctconference.org/2025/cfp

Today, the UK government announced a proposal to change copyright law - for the benefit of AI companies - that would cause huge, irreversible harm to creators.

More info below, but most importantly here's what you can do (wherever you live):

1. Email your MP. Template letter in 🧵 👇

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For my first post on Bluesky .. I'll start by announcing our 2025 edition of EEML which will be in Sarajevo :) ! I'm really excited about it and hope to see many of you there. Please follow the website (and Bluesky account) for more details which are coming soon ..

Could language games (and playing many of them) be the renewable energy that Ilya was hinting at yesterday? They do address two core challenges of self-improvement -- let's discuss!

My talk is today at 11:40am, West Meeting Room 220-222, #NeurIPS2024
language-gamification.github.io/schedule/

US and China sign new science pact — but with severe restrictions Amid tensions, the two nations agree on a path forward for research collaboration.

Very good to see the renewal of the US-China science and technology pact. Even if it is reduced in scope, some limited cooperation is better than none at all, as we at the AI & Geopolitics Project argue in our latest report 'Moving Beyond Competition'.

Participatory and inclusive data stewardship A landscape review

Our new landscape review examines the foundations of participatory and inclusive data stewardship.

The review demonstrates the liveliness of debate around ‘data stewardship’ and aims to support future research and practice.

www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/report/parti...

Great news 🥳 congrats.

I look forward to co-directing the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Program at CIFAR with @catherineregis.bsky.social

We will be designing the program in the coming months and will soon share ways to get involved with this new community.

Read more here: cifar.ca/cifarnews/20...

Enjoyed reading this interview:

"...rather than talk about AI in Africa, we are instead trying to focus on the context of where you are on the continent rather than a definitive catch-all that ignores the massive differences in place and experience.”

wearecs.org/cs-magazine/...

There is just about a month left before the abstract deadline for @facct.bsky.social 2025🥳😳🙈. Really looking forward to seeing all the submissions. If you are submitting, don’t forget to check out the Author Guide (and the reviewer and AC guide as well). facctconference.org/2025/aguide

Like its predecessor (GraphCast), the weights & code of GenCast have been made publicly available: github.com/google-deepm...

We’re looking forward to seeing how the community builds on this!

Probabilistic weather forecasting with machine learning - Nature GenCast, a probabilistic weather model using artificial intelligence for weather forecasting, has greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world and provid...

So excited to share our Google DeepMind team's new Nature paper on GenCast, an ML-based probabilistic weather forecasting model: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It represents a substantial step forward in how we predict weather and assess the risk of extreme events. 🌪️🧵

Dan Andrews: Gods and Robots Image of Narcissus gazing into a pond and seeing AI reflect back.

1/25 Welcome to the "Atomic Human Advent Calendar"

A new post or every day.

the-atomic-human.ai/images/dan-a...

I'm please to share the work of Dan Andrews of scribeysense.

I asked Dan to read the book and create a drawing for each chapter. Here's how Dan responded to Chapter 1.

Generative Science: Roles for Generative AI in Scientific Discovery Keynote at the AI for Science Summit hosted by Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery. Video TBC. Hello and thank you for having me today. I love coming back to Cambridge so it’s a real trea…

And if interested, this is the text and slides from the talk. blog.shakirm.com/2023/12/gene...

Got this amazing graphic summary of a keynote I gave on the Roles for generative AI in scientific discovery. From the amazing Dan Andrews at an event by @acceleratescience.bsky.social (Last Dec already 👻). Check Dan out on LinkedIn and consider for your next event. www.linkedin.com/posts/danscr...

Our team at Google DeepMind is hiring Student Researchers for 2025!

🧑‍🔬 Interested in understanding reasoning capabilities of neural networks from first principles?
🧑‍🎓 Currently studying for a BS/MS/PhD?
🧑‍💻 Have solid engineering and research skills?

🌟 We want to hear from you! Details in thread.

Probabilistic weather forecasting with machine learning - Nature GenCast, a probabilistic weather model using artificial intelligence for weather forecasting, has greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world and provid...

Very excited to see the @deep-mind.bsky.social GenCast paper in press at Nature! Great work by the core team at GDM; GenCast provides a significant step forward with the ability to draw realistic sample ensemble members from the posterior forecast distribution. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This was a fun paper to read. It uses generative architectures and concepts combined with strong and rigorous evaluation.

Probabilistic weather forecasting with machine learning - Nature GenCast, a probabilistic weather model using artificial intelligence for weather forecasting, has greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world and provid...

The next generation of probabilistic machine learning for weather called GenCast is published in @natureportfolio.bsky.social today 🥳. Amazing to see the collective progress in ML for weather as a field over the last 5 years. 🏖️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

According to the blue sky roast tool, I “blend climate science and humor like a gourmet chef and a plant-based kitchen”. My account offers “positive vibes and climate jives, like a walk in a Texas wildflower field.”

The bluesky roast tool is hilarious. Get yours here.

blueskyroast.com

I hope I am not late to the party (was away post-quals chilling) but here are some thoughts on why this is bad IMO:

First, a disclaimer that I am writing this as an African who is a speaker of multiple African languages, NLP researcher of African languages, and HCI researcher focusing broadly on..