Amin Rahimian

A 2024 study found that ants best humans at tests of collective intelligence.

Learn more on #WorldAnimalDay: https://scim.ag/42nMvQJ

OUR BLESSED mixed models vs THEIR BARABAROUS fixed effects OUR GLORIOUS Mundlak device vs THEIR WICKED demeaning OUR GREAT variance components vs THEIR PRIMITIVE dummy variables OUR NOBLE partial pooling vs THEIR BACKWARD unbiased estimates OUR HEROIC maximum likelihoos vs THEIR BRUTISH least squares

I could have sworn I created this before on our Previous Parish, but couldn't find it so made it fresh.

I present:
OUR BLESSED mixed models // THEIR BARBAROUS fixed effects

Front cover: Differential Privacy in Artificial Intelligence: From Theory to Practice, now Publishers

New differential #privacy textbook in town: "DP in Artificial Intelligence: From Theory to Practice", by @nandofioretto.bsky.social and @vanhentenryck.bsky.social. Open access, w/ chapters by @jubaz.bsky.social, @grahamrc.bsky.social, and @stein.ke!

www.nowpublishers.com/article/Book...

Experimentation and thinking at the level of a program of experiments
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/05/e...

🚨 I am co-chairing ALT 2026 this year with Matus Telgarsky. The submission server is open so please submit your best work!

Deadline: Oct 2, 2025 AoE
Confernece: Feb 23-26, 2026 in Toronto!
Website: algorithmiclearningtheory.org/alt2026/

Socio-Spatial Patterns of Suicide Mortality in the United States https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.29.25334693v1

Survey Statistics: connections to experimental design
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/02/s...

🚨 New postdoc position in our lab at Berkeley EECS! 🚨

(please reshare)

We seek applicants with experience in language modeling who are excited about high-impact applications in the health and social sciences!

More info in thread

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Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI offers early-career scholars intellectual freedom, competitive benefits, research funds, and collaboration with leading scientists.

Learn more: santafe.edu/news-center/news/join-sfi-as-a-complexity-postdoctoral-fellow

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on.

Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts.

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How information sharing in social media has slowly shifted from public posting to private channels. Strong empirical evidence from Facebook by the one and only Kiran Garimella. DETOX #ICWSM.

Assistant, Associate or Full Professor, AI & Society The Department of AI and Society (AIS) at the University at Buffalo (UB) invites candidates to apply for multiple positions as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Full Professor. The new AIS ...

UB's new Department of AI and Society is hiring faculty across ranks (Assistant, Associate, Full Professor). We’re looking for transdisciplinary scholars interested in building AI by society, for society. Start dates begin Fall 2025.

More info: www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/57734

Great news! congrats:)

Nice new paper in PNAS providing further evidence that random/long ties help social contagions — even many that would be labeled "complex contagions"
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @davidlazer.bsky.social

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~~ making sense of academic statistics ~~

i wrote about the confusing relationship between statistics and data analysis, and also about how statistics relates to science

#statistics #rstats #datascience

www.alexpghayes.com/post/making-...

ACM EAAMO, which is coming to Pitt this Fall, has two events for students: a doctoral consortium and a poster session, both of which are due July 25th
- poster session conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for...
- doctoral consortium
conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for...

ACM EAAMO, which is coming to Pitt this Fall, has two events for students: a doctoral consortium and a poster session, both of which are due July 25th
- poster session conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for...
- doctoral consortium
conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for...

Who Sees Who? In the comedy Home Alone, a burglar posing as a police officer walks door to door during the holidays to find out which families will be traveling, leaving their empty homes easy prey for a break-in. ...

- differentially private distributed estimation & learning arxiv.org/abs/2306.15865 IISE transactions, featured: content.presspage.com/uploads/2602...
- differentially private distributed inference arxiv.org/abs/2402.08156
- privacy-preserving sequential learning arxiv.org/abs/2502.19525 (FORC'25)

Who Sees Who? In the comedy Home Alone, a burglar posing as a police officer walks door to door during the holidays to find out which families will be traveling, leaving their empty homes easy prey for a break-in. ...

nice piece by Pitt Swanson School of Engineering, showcasing three recent privacy works with @papachristoumarios.bsky.social and @yuxin-pitt.bsky.social - news.engineering.pitt.edu/who-sees-who/

🚨Free data alert!! 🚨 Please share.

Large new dataset of Amazon product reviews, including full text and photos and product characteristics, with individual *reviews labeled as fake reviews*.

I believe this is the first publicly available data of this kind.

github.com/bretthollenb...

Postdoctoral Position | Center for Adaptive Rationality

We are hiring, @arc-mpib.bsky.social a postdoc for a project to investigate why citizens feel alienated from liberal democracy and how a shared sense of reality can be restored.
Work with @lfoswaldo.bsky.social @anaskozyreva.bsky.social, Ralph Hertwig and me:
www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/2084802/2025...

Cognitive representations of social networks in isolated villages - Nature Human Behaviour Feltham et al. develop a sampling strategy to evaluate social network cognition across 82 Honduran villages, systematically mapping the underlying village networks.

New by @ericfeltham.bsky.social, Laura Forastiere, and @nachristakis.bsky.social: an extraordinarily ambitious effort to scale up and bring Krackhardt's classic work on cognitive social structures (CSSs) into the 21st century. Super excited to see it in print. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

People not only form social networks, they construct mental maps of them. People think about the ties between other people, including ties among individuals to whom they are not themselves directly connected. These “cognitive social networks” have rarely been studied. 1/

in a sequential social learning scenario, a sequence of agents make binary decisions on the basis of their private signals and information available to them from past choices. information cascade in this scenario refers to discounting of new private information in favor of past public actions

@yuxin-pitt.bsky.social presenting shortly in responsiblecomputing.org/forc-2025/ (extended abstract: drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/vol... - working paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.19525) also last month at the Network Science in Economics conference, both in beautiful Stanford bsky.app/profile/yuxi...

smooth randomized response guarantees learning at log(n) rate that is much faster than the sqrt(log n) rate in the non-private case & achieves finite expected times to the first correct action and last incorrect action, both of which are infinite in the non-private case + same eps can minimize both

a simple randomized response that flips actions with constant probability will prevents any cascade and asymptotic learning, but we can use a smooth version that hides signal locations within a range; this way, actions can be flipped with a probability that decays smoothly outside the range

for Gaussian signals, agent n switches its action from 0 to 1 when its private signal exceeds a threshold t(l_n) as a function of the log-likelihood ratio of public belief. In the non-private case, l_n grows as sqrt(log n), and agents eventually (but very slowly) take the correction almost surely

threshold k for a cascade (the number where having k signals of one type more than the other, makes following agents ignore their private signal and initiate a cascade) is fixed over intervals of eps. At interval boundaries, decreasing eps increases k by one and correct cascade probability jumps up