brendan o’connor
natural language processing, social science, umass, western mass
http://brenocon.com he/him
- Reposted by brendan o’connorto turn off autoplaying video on the bluesky mobile app select the icon in the top left corner go to settings go to content and media make sure "autoplay videos and gifs" is toggled off
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- Reposted by brendan o’connor✨The NLP+CSS workshop is returning to ACL 2026!✨ And this year, we have a new shared task with prizes! Website/CfP: sites.google.com/site/nlpandc... Deadlines: March 5 (direct), March 24 (pre-reviewed ARR) #NLProc #CompSocialSci #ComputationalSocialScience #ACL2026NLP @aclmeeting.bsky.social
- Reposted by brendan o’connor"Why agent-based modeling could happen in economics. Eventually." Good piece by @mikemakowsky.bsky.social economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/29/p... I'd argue that the "new era of theory" is already underway, though, led not by economists, but by comp social sci/cultural evolution folks.
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- re @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com on NSF support for the web www.liberalcurrents.com/marc-andrees... -- the NSF specifically gave $3.7M just for Mosaic www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/... and $4.6M for a related effort www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...
- i agree, huge change. also as a reviewer, it used to be other reviewers on a paper were non-anonymous. when i was junior, i found this motivating and conducive to learning & community-building - i might see a review i admired, then learn more about the reviewer's work and their way of thinking.
- Here at UMass Amherst CICS, we’re searching for TT faculty in NLP – see the link from www.cics.umass.edu/about/employ... I’m happy to answer questions of course, too!
- The posting was just updated - applications due Dec 15.
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- the way this is going the only trustworthy information will be from in-person interviews. for annotation projects i find it much easier to trust small numbers of expert or local students annotators, compared to broad-audience online recruiting
- i can’t believe how terrible larry summers is
- gosh I wonder why they called her peril www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
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- and (i believe) tal is presenting this work at the umass linguistics colloquium, this friday! ILC S211 at 3:30pm
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- great paper! we already found it useful to inform another ongoing project (in more of a health domain; many domains face similar issues)
- Reposted by brendan o’connorWhen I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.
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- Reposted by brendan o’connorLLMs introduce a huge range of new capabilities for research, but also make it possible for researchers to "hack" their results in new ways by how they chose to use models for annotation This is a useful pass at quantifying some of the risk, and some mitigation strategies arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825
- this is really bad (CW suicide discussion. a lot of it, thanks to chatgpt)
- Reposted by brendan o’connorPleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...
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- Reposted by brendan o’connorTerence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social) has written a thread on Mastodon about the impact of the federal grant freeze to UCLA, particularly to his own field of Mathematics. UCLA's IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics) could shut down entirely mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568...
- Reposted by brendan o’connorCheck this out! Happy to talk to folks about Valley living, feel free to DM.
- Mount Holyoke College in lovely western Massachusetts is hiring a tenure-track neuroscientist. Amazing students and fantastic faculty support - please share! mtholyoke.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...
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- #acl2025 anyone get a good quote of phil resnik's last comment? context: (some?all?) panelists & him agree the field needs more deep, careful research on smaller models to do better science. everyone is frustrated with impossibility of large-scale pretraining experiments
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- Unfortunately I'm missing #ic2s2 but our work on practical event extraction & analyzing international news coverage bias will be presented there as well! this work --
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- Reposted by brendan o’connorAI & Society faculty opportunity posted just this month with a start date of Fall 2025 and beyond: www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/57734 ‼️🐂 For "interdisciplinary scholars whose research agenda connects the study of AI with humanistic and/or social scientific line(s) of study"
