Serena Booth

The ACM has now issued an official statement arguing against a federal moratorium on state AI regulation.

www.acm.org/binaries/con...

PhD advert CS PhD openings @ Harvard HCI’s Variation Lab advised by Prof. Elena Glassman A little history Founded in the fall of 2018, our small group has been a home for some truly terrific interdisciplinary HC...

We're admitting PhD students! (Possible co-PIs include @zittrain.bsky.social or @ianarawjo.bsky.social if interests align.) We're excited about:

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Interested? Fill out the linked form & apply to Harvard SEAS (listing me as faculty of interest) by Dec 15th!

Also, our team is hiring an AI Research Scientist!

www.usajobs.gov/job/851528400

such a good idea

I'm briefly stopping by #NeurIPS2025. I'll be at the alignment workshop, a mentor at WiML, and giving a talk about AI policy in the Education track on Tuesday.

Let's hangggg

Contact Us Contact Us.

And the way you do that is by reaching out to Tom Romanoff, ACM's director of global policy and public affairs: www.acm.org/public-polic...

ACM members/computing researchers who should be members interested in contributing should join the subcommittee's mailing list!

One of our goals here is to build policy coalitions across institutions so we can do more as a collective 💪 and balance special interest groups.

I think we do better!!! I even think if we look in the right places (survey science, demography, computational social sciences), we already know how to do better.

🚨The Formalism-Implementation Gap in RL research🚨

Lots of progress in RL research over last 10 years, but too much performance-driven => overfitting to benchmarks (like the ALE).

1⃣ Let's advance science of RL
2⃣ Let's be explicit about how benchmarks map to formalism

1/X

Advocating with Evidence: Lessons for Tech Researchers in Civil Society Advocating with Evidence: Lessons for Tech Researchers in Civil Society November 13, 2025, 10-11am ET online Civil society is struggling to address how technology and the tech industry contribute to e...

I receive so many questions about what research in civil society is like -- Join our virtual panel to hear more about exactly that! @cdt.org @datasociety.bsky.social @aclu.org

With @thakurdhanaraj.bsky.social @alicetiara.bsky.social and @mkgerchick.bsky.social

To register:
cdt.org/event/advoca...

Natalie's stuff makes me want to pivot my research to focus on algorithmic collusion 😅

Cohere Labs - Calarina Muslimani, PhD student, University of Alberta Cohere Labs - Calarina Muslimani - Towards Improving Reward Design in RL: A Reward Alignment Metric for RL Practitioners

Calarina Muslimani is presenting at the Cohere RL group tomorrow October 23rd at 12pm EST about our work on "Towards Improving Reward Design in RL: A Reward Alignment Metric for RL Practitioners".

This work won an ✨outstanding paper✨ award at RLC :D

Link: cohere.com/events/coher...

I find CA Sen Weiner's AI policy prominence and upcoming challenge to Nancy Pelosi endlessly amusing. When we were 22, my tech bro friends and I mobilized to vote Sen Weiner into office bc of his campaign promise to keep SF nightlife open til 4. We just wanted to hang late at Armory Club, ya know.

In this blog, I talk about starting the CNTR AI Policy Summer School. Importantly, the summer school is nonpartisan: the goal is to train AI experts of all political persuasions to engage productively with government.

Rebuilding an Optimistic Vision for AI Policy Recall November 6, 2024 — the day after the U.S. election. I was driving back to my home in Washington, DC, from Ohio with colleagues. I was heartbroken not because of the rebuke to my political party...

I wrote a (personal) blog post about my hopes and dreams for AI policy, my devastation after the US Election, and my process of picking myself off the floor by rebuilding an optimistic vision for AI scientists in government through education: simons.berkeley.edu/news/rebuild...

Heading to #COLM2025! Catch me at the workshop on bridging NLP and public opinion research (NLPOR). I’ll be on a panel lamenting our approach to indirect and inscrutable content moderation through RLHF.

Important update about my dog's life

@isaacsheidlo.bsky.social and I have been talking a lot about how to make robots a pre-distributive technology (can we move away from the individual ownership model?), so I'm going to talk a bit about lessons learned from the AI governance space and what we collectively should be doing w/ robots.

I'm nearly in Seoul for #CoRL2025, where I'll be presenting a talk on "Robots as the testbed for AI, AI as the testbed for Robots" at the Eval&Deploy workshop. Super excited to rep the newly formed Brown GIRAFFE Lab in the wild for the first time :D :D :D @confrobotlearning.bsky.social. Say hi!

The admin also reversed their position on visas for Chinese students and are processing their visa applications in large numbers. We need to celebrate this too!

The house approps budget is out, and it includes a very slight increase to the NIH budget. Senate approps committee held NSF funding steady. Don't back down from this fight!!!

We must celebrate and share our wins, too, to build and maintain momentum.

appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

I almost never watch short form video, and I feel like I'm not missing much?

This is totally unacceptable.

I've followed Lisa Cook for a while since she has developed the leading perspective on AI over at the Fed: www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

Emma is amazing, you should apply.

How artificial intelligence uncouples hard work from fair wages through ‘surveillance pay’ practices—and how to fix it How surveillance pay practices work, where they are increasingly deployed in the U.S. economy, and policy recommendations to ensure pay fairness and transparency.

Algorithmic Wage Discrimination is spreading beyond 'Gig' work:

Healthcare, Customer Service, & Logistics bosses are buying AI products that set compensation structures & wages using real time data. @wilneida.bsky.social & I did an audit & here are our findings
equitablegrowth.org/how-artifici...

Why not tell her??? If you don't, I will!

Data Brokers Are Ignoring Privacy Law. We Deserve Better. Of the many principles EFF fights for in consumer data privacy legislation, one of the most basic is a right to access the data companies have about you. It’s only fair. So many companies collect

One study shows four in ten data brokers are leaving consumers exercising their privacy rights on read—in violation of California law. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

We shouldn't just be aiming for whistleblower protections. We should borrow from finance land and create whistleblower *incentives* (www.sec.gov/enforcement-...).

Answers almost all questions with “it depends…”

The fun lil update is that this work won RLC Outstanding Paper in Emerging Topics :D. Work with Calarina Muslimani, Kerrick Johnstonbaugh, Suyog Chandramouli, @bradknox.bsky.social, and Matt Taylor.