Johan Ugander

Excited to be on sabbatical visiting @Yale for the 24-25 academic year! First day in my @yaledatascience office high in Kline tower, overlooking East Rock. Still getting settled, but if you're here and want to chat, hit me up!

Discover new research on algorithms, trust, and social media at the Social Algorithms Workshop @Yale organized by @jugander with talks by @BrendanNyhan, Mor Naaman, Smitha Milli & more. Register: yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgorith… | Enter code sawitonX on last registration page for 25% off.

@plopnl @jgitchell @yaledatascience Hello! PNAS published the paper faster than we expected; the code is public but double checking that we properly cleaned the data is taking a bit of time — please check back in a week and/or email me and I’ll be happy to send you a note when it’s posted!

@jgitchell @yaledatascience @jugander The data set on the GitHub repo leads to a dead link 😢

Folks who toil around #CommunityNotes may find this summary of work from @yaledatascience @jugander worth the time! news.yale.edu/2025/09/25/fla…

There is travel assistance (and free registration) available for PhD students and postdocs presenting posters! Submit by 9/22! yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgorith…

📣Yale social algorithms workshop, Oct 16-17!📣 What's new in content ranking? Content moderation? How can platforms promote civility? Hosted by Yale's Institute for Foundations of Data Science. Great speakers! Submit posters by 9/22! Spread the word! yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgorith…

By far the best commentary on this drama. Thank you! Also, the SuperNotes paper is extremely interesting. There are so many awful ideas in the LLMs-for-combatting-misinformation space but this seems really well thought out. arxiv.org/abs/2411.06116 By @actuallysoham, @jaybaxter, @bakkermichiel @msaveski. I hope CN team is working on actually piloting it on X rather than leaving it as a research paper!

@elonmusk Community notes is the most boring Facebook name ever

After many conversations with artists and many hours in the art library, this essay is the result. Things also got delightfully weird when we tried to decide how to randomize author order. I'm pretty sure this is the first paper with an author order determined by tarot! 4/4

When @_ziv_e started as a postdoc at Stanford, I unloaded some of my thoughts on him, and he became super energized by how it aligned with challenges he'd been thinking about in the modern AI art space. See his 2023 collaborative perspective in Science: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… 3/

Now up on HDSR, "The Art of Randomness: Sampling and Chance in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction", a collaboration with @_ziv_e where we examine the stochastic nature of AI tools by connecting to the history of chance aesthetics: hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/x5yq8vmk/r… 1/

@dianarycai Very cool -- progress from the choice of a good basis is extremely satisfying, congrats!

New paper on EigenVI! To appear at #NeurIPS2024 as a spotlight. EigenVI is an eigenvalue-based approach to black-box VI & constructs its variational approximations from orthogonal function expansions -- inspired by solutions to the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics.

The #RankedChoiceVoting Act is a landmark piece of legislation that would institute RCV for all primary and general elections for the U.S. House & Senate. fairvoteaction.org/ranked-choice-…

@zdeborova Love it! I like to cook black trumpet into a cream sauce over pasta, more so than essentially any other mushroom. They also dry (and revitalize) very well in my experience!

My favorite pastime. Anyone has a yummy recipe for trompettes de mort?

Apropos nothing at all, I finally got around to ordering the 2022 book Breaking Ranks, by the former president of Reed College who broke with US News in 1995. insidehighered.com/admissions/art…

We are hiring at @CornellInfoSci ! Open rank: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/28405 Cornell is a fantastic place to work, please consider applying and sharing this opportunity.

I haven't had a chance to read yet, but looks like @StefanWager wrote the causal inference book I've always wanted! web.stanford.edu/~swager/causal…

@alex_peys @kchonyc If not named, "spoiler effect" or "vote splitting" would be apt. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_e…

well there are many reasons greedy can fail, but i mean this particular one. here is an example, suppose the next word is either cat (p=.9) or dog (p=.1). now consider a world where there are 100 synonyms for cat that are used completely at random and interchangeably, well then we still have p(dog)=.1 but now greedy will select “dog” as the next word because all the cat synonyms distributed the probability mass. using nucleus sampling would fix this (and indeed is one of the motivations) but i am just wondering if someone has named this phenomenon because none of the papers that talk about this happening in their examples give it a name

is there an actual name for the phenomenon when you have K tokens that are all actually good potential next tokens but because probability mass is split among them greedy sampling chooses a (worse) token not from the set?

Can we have more control over our social media feeds? Help researchers explore new solutions and receive $20 in compensation if you qualify and complete the study. Take the survey to see if you qualify: stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3…

📣Applications for our @ICERM Workshop on Patterns, Dynamics, and Data in Complex Systems (taking place Jan. 21-24, 2025) are open now at icerm.brown.edu/topical_worksh… 📣. This workshop combines theory, computation, & applications in #pattern formation. We encourage apps by early Oct!

@malleshpai A decade ago there was @credsme by @seanjtaylor & collabs, it was cool! x.com/seanjtaylor/st…

Related idea: We have lots of folks larping as superforecasters/ trading gurus etc on CT/Fintwit/ Econtwit. How about an app that allows folks to prove there's actual alpha in their prognostication...