Emma Pierson

Our paper, "What's in My Human Feedback", was selected for an oral at ICLR! Our method automatically + interpretably identifies preferences in human feedback data; we use this to improve personalization + safety. Please reach out if you have data/use cases to apply this to!

Congratulations to @gsagostini, whose recent Nature Comms paper releasing a fine-grained migration dataset (nature.com/articles/s4146…) just won a student paper award at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting!

Horrifying. We need to know exactly how this happened. Again, I do not believe for a second that this was intentional, but a terrible terrible mistake was made. We very much need to know if any policy changes contributed to it.

📢 I'm recruiting a postdoc to start in summer 2026! My lab is part of @Berkeley_EECS, @UCJointCPH & @berkeley_ai. We're looking for candidates in AI & society, with projects on the societal impacts of gen AI (collaborating w/ real-world orgs) and modeling human behavior with AI!

@thegreatgustby @OpenAI I did.

.@OpenAI is nothing without its people -- many of whom are brilliant, ethical, and able to work anywhere. Please, guys -- is this empowerment of authoritarians really what you want to be striving towards? Your talents are better-used elsewhere.

200+ Google and OpenAI staff have signed this petition to share Anthropic's red lines for the Pentagon's use of AI let's find out if this is a race to the top or the bottom notdivided.org

@DanielFein7 Whoa very cool!!

@2plus2make5 We applied this to our creative writing preference dataset! x.com/danielfein7/st…

Our paper, "What's in My Human Feedback", was selected for an oral at ICLR! Our method automatically + interpretably identifies preferences in human feedback data; we use this to improve personalization + safety. Please reach out if you have data/use cases to apply this to!

AI is changing economics, and --- as we just saw in Dwarkesh's interview with Dario --- AI researchers need to start thinking about economics too! The Center for Applied AI at UChicago will be hosting an AI & Economics Summer Institute to explore exactly this. We will bring together leading researchers with advanced graduate students in economics/AI/ML/NLP for an in-person program between Aug 6 - 11.

Paper: nature.com/articles/s4146… Cornell Chronicle article: news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/0… Data access: migrate.tech.cornell.edu Joint work led by the geospatial wizard @gsagostini and great coauthors Rachel Young, Maria Fitzpatrick, and @NikhGarg!

Now out in Nature Communications - we have released a migration dataset that is - 4000x more granular than existing public data - highly correlated with Census data - being used by >100 academic, govt, and non-profit teams all over the world See @gsagostini's thread!

@JamesADiao did a wonderful job leading this work with a great team of coauthors - @rajivmovva, Lingwei Cheng, Kowe Kadoma, @aashnapshah, @Neil_R_Powe, @KadijaFerryman, and @arjunmanrai. Paper: jamanetwork.com/journals/jamai…

New paper in @JAMAInternalMed: Patient race is widely used in medical algorithms...but it's unclear how patients feel about this. We conduct the first nationally-representative survey to find out, producing 4 key findings with practical implications - see James' thread!

This video of Alex Pretti was posted on Facebook by Mac Randolph, the son of the deceased veteran, with this caption:

If there was ever a moment for libertarians and conservatives to step up and join the rest of us, we’re in it. Americans have to unite and stop this descent from a freedom-loving nation into the kind of place where masked, militarized government agents are sent to politically noncompliant areas to roam the streets, terrorize civilians, and deploy violence with impunity.

Approval on immigration had been a comparative bright spot for Trump. But there has been a persistent decline over the past few months and today almost certainly makes that worse. He's losing the normies not just the libs.

This is absolutely shameful. Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.

ICE's actions are immoral, illegal, and extremely unpopular. And their budget has skyrocketed. They should not keep receiving such a large share of our tax dollars.

Take a moment to look at the inhumanity captured in this extraordinary photo running on the front page of tonight's Minneapolis @StarTribune. It shows federal immigration agents immobilizing a protester on the ground and spraying chemical irritant directly into his face. The scene reminds me of the brutality used against civil rights protesters in the 1960s. We look back at those old photos and wonder how the authorities could have behaved so savagely; many years from now, young Americans will look at these photos from 2026 and wonder how anyone could have justified shooting a woman in the head as she tried to drive away, arresting 5-year-old schoolchildren on the street, or holding a man down and spaying chemicals into his face. Thanks to the Star Tribune reporters and photographers for documenting this work; they create accountability, they make democracy work, and they make all of us in journalism proud.

Thanks to @Kara_Jean7 at Berkeley News for this profile of our lab's recent work on fairer decision-making in healthcare and policing! news.berkeley.edu/2026/01/20/ai-…