Tootfinder

You are an expert in ontologies and kn owledge graphs? You have an interest (or even better expertise) in materials science engineering? Then you should apply! Open PostDoc/Senior Researcher position at FIZ Karlsruhe ISE Research Team in the Knowledge Graph department. More info at https://www.fiz-k…

Ecocidal Israeli Death Force uproots thousands of Palestinian olive trees in West Bank | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/23/israeli-military-uproots-thousan…

Israeli military uproots thousands of Palestinian olive trees in West Bank
Israeli destruction in al-Mughayyir near Ramallah is part of push to forcibly displace Palestinians, researcher says.

Researcher Population Pyramids for Tracking Global Demographic and Gender Trajectories
Kazuki Nakajima, Takayuki Mizuno
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15500 ht…

Researcher Population Pyramids for Tracking Global Demographic and Gender Trajectories
The sustainability of the global academic ecosystem relies on researcher demographics and gender balance, yet assessing these dynamics in a timely manner for policy is challenging. Here, we propose a researcher population pyramids framework for tracking global demographic and gender trajectories using publication data. This framework provides a timely snapshot of historical and present demographics and gender balance, revealing three contrasting research systems: Emerging systems (e.g., Arab co…

How much of my children's future is AI going to burn up? That depends on how much we feed the hype beast. *That* is why "don't use AI at all without mentioning the drawbacks & a very good reason" is my stance (and I'm an AI researcher, technically).
Local models that run on your laptop: acceptable if produced by ethical means (including data sourcing & compensation for data filtering) & training costs are mitigated. Are such models way worse than the huge datacenter-scale models? Yes, for now. Deal with it.
ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, even DeepSeek: get out. You're feeding the beast that is consuming my kids' future. Heck, even talking up these models or about how "everyone is using them so it's okay" or about "they're not going away" I'd feeding the beast even if you don't touch them.
I wish it weren't like this, because the capabilities of the big models are cool even once you cut past the hype.
#AI

Choose Democracy – Resist List
https://choosedemocracy.us/resist-list/

laplax -- Laplace Approximations with JAX
Tobias Weber, B\'alint Mucs\'anyi, Lenard Rommel, Thomas Christie, Lars Kas\"uschke, Marvin Pf\"ortner, Philipp Hennig
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17013

laplax -- Laplace Approximations with JAX
The Laplace approximation provides a scalable and efficient means of quantifying weight-space uncertainty in deep neural networks, enabling the application of Bayesian tools such as predictive uncertainty and model selection via Occam's razor. In this work, we introduce laplax, a new open-source Python package for performing Laplace approximations with jax. Designed with a modular and purely functional architecture and minimal external dependencies, laplax offers a flexible and researcher-frien…

Researcher brutecat finds a vulnerability that revealed the phone number linked to any Google account via brute forcing phone numbers; Google fixed the issue (Joseph Cox/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/a-researcher-figur

A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account
Phone numbers are a goldmine for SIM swappers. A researcher found how to get this precious piece of information from any Google account.

Harvard hired a researcher to uncover its ties to slavery. He says the results cost him his job: 'We found too many slaves' (Michela Moscufo/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jun/21/harvard-slavery-decendants-of-the-enslaved
http://www.memeorandum.com/250621/p42#a250621p42

MedReseacher-R1: Expert-Level Medical Deep Researcher via A Knowledge-Informed Trajectory Synthesis Framework
Ailing Yu, Lan Yao, Jingnan Liu, Zhe Chen, Jiajun Yin, Yuan Wang, Xinhao Liao, Zhiling Ye, Ji Li, Yun Yue, Hansong Xiao, Hualei Zhou, Chunxiao Guo, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14880…

MedReseacher-R1: Expert-Level Medical Deep Researcher via A Knowledge-Informed Trajectory Synthesis Framework
Recent developments in Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have shown impressive capabilities spanning multiple domains, exemplified by deep research systems that demonstrate superior performance on complex information-seeking and synthesis tasks. While general-purpose deep research agents have shown impressive capabilities, they struggle significantly with medical domain challenges, as evidenced by leading proprietary systems achieving limited accuracy on complex medical benchmarks. The ke…

You are an expert in ontologies and knowledge graphs? You have an interest (or even better expertise) in materials science engineering? Then you should apply! Open PostDoc/Senior Researcher position at FIZ Karlsruhe ISE Research Team in the Knowledge Graph department. More info at https://www.fiz-ka…

Dance helped Lynn Swann become a Hall of Famer. A researcher thinks all athletes could benefit https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6498127/2025/07/17/dance-helped-lynn-swann-become-a-hall-of-famer-a-res…

Security researcher #exploits #GitHub gotcha, gets admin access to all #Istio repositories and more

Hackers impersonating US government compromise email account of prominent Russia researcher https://therecord.media/keir-giles-russia-researcher-email-hacked

Kateryna is a brilliant scientist who I first got to know via @… - she works on internal wave breaking in the ocean and how that can lead to #ice melt. She has also been organising meet a scientist sessions for #Ukraine's school age diaspora since the invasion
https://fediscience.org/@OceanIceEU/114828392533900541
OceanIceEU - 🆕 Check out our latest 'Researcher in the Spotlight' feature on  Kateryna Terletska, a researcher in OCEAN ICE
🔎Learn more about Kateryna here: https://ocean-ice.eu/researcher-in-the-spotlight-kateryna-terletska/

Modern approaches to building effective interpretable models of the property market using machine learning
Irina G. Tanashkina, Alexey S. Tanashkin, Alexander S. Maksimchuik, Anna Yu. Poshivailo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15723

Modern approaches to building effective interpretable models of the property market using machine learning
In this article, we review modern approaches to building interpretable models of property markets using machine learning on the base of mass valuation of property in the Primorye region, Russia. The researcher, lacking expertise in this topic, encounters numerous difficulties in the effort to build a good model. The main source of this is the huge difference between noisy real market data and ideal data which is very common in all types of tutorials on machine learning. This paper covers all st…

A researcher found 88 TikTok accounts that used AI-generated versions of Jorge Ramos and other Spanish-language journalists to spread misinformation for profit (Nicole Acevedo/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/fake-ai-vide…

What's behind the TikTok accounts using AI-generated versions of real Latino journalists?
The accounts point to the challenge of stopping or controlling the surge in fake images and misinformation targeting Spanish-speakers in the U.S., as AI technology advances.

Want super-thorough AI responses by applying deep thought & reasoning AI technology?
Any Microsoft 365 Copilot (Commercial) licensed user can now use the Researcher & Analyst agents at no additional cost! These new agents provide very thorough responses to help you collect FACTS on informational topics & review DATA to derive insights... with human language.
✅ #Researcher

Researcher and Analyst are now generally available | Microsoft 365 Blog
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Researcher and Analyst, two first-of-their-kind reasoning agents designed for work. Learn more.

A security researcher said
flaws in a carmaker’s online dealership portal
exposed the private information
and vehicle data of its customers,
and could have allowed hackers to remotely break into any of its customers’ vehicles.
Eaton Zveare, who works as a security researcher at software delivery company Harness,
told TechCrunch the flaw he discovered
allowed the creation of an admin account
that granted “unfettered access” to the unnamed carma…

Security flaws in a carmaker's web portal let one hacker remotely unlock cars from anywhere | TechCrunch
Security researcher Eaton Zveare told TechCrunch that the flaws he discovered in the carmaker's centralized dealer portal exposed vast access to customer and vehicle data. With this access, Zveare said he could remotely take over a customer's account and unlock their cars, and more.

Hello!
I have a happy favour to ask.
Last year, I had a US intern working with us and she now is looking for help that you- good reader of this account- could give.
(She needs academic survey participants)
Check out her flyer below, click the link, and please RT
http…

Research Study on Data Privacy and Collective Redress
A researcher at University College Dublin wants to conduct anonymous interviews to learn about why you would or would not participate in a legal action to rectify a data protection violation. This information can be used to help nonprofit organizations better represent you when organizations violate your data protection rights. Provide your email to receive more information. All personally identifiable information will be deleted following completion of the study.

"Navigating #openaccess publishing #agreement caps in 2025" https://…

In an internal Meta essay, an outgoing AI researcher says a "culture of fear", with performance reviews and layoffs, is spreading like "a metastatic cancer" (Kalley Huang/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/me…

Meta AI Researcher Warns of ‘Metastatic Cancer’ Afflicting Company Culture
Over the past month, Meta Platforms has overhauled its stumbling efforts in artificial intelligence by making a head-spinning series of hires of leaders and researchers from outside the company. But a key question has lingered: Why has Meta struggled so badly in AI that it’s injecting so much ...

When I say that I wish the bubble would burst so we could start having actual conversation, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.
In the meantime, not being a researcher myself in any kind of position to critique the paper, I’m happy to just look at it and cherry-pick the conclusion that I think is unequivocally helpful regardless: we all (students in school, students of life) should cultivate active, engaged minds that work with ideas by •doing• and •creating• instead of simply passively receiving.

Code Researcher: Deep Research Agent for Large Systems Code and Commit History
Ramneet Singh, Sathvik Joel, Abhav Mehrotra, Nalin Wadhwa, Ramakrishna B Bairi, Aditya Kanade, Nagarajan Natarajan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11060

Code Researcher: Deep Research Agent for Large Systems Code and Commit History
Large Language Model (LLM)-based coding agents have shown promising results on coding benchmarks, but their effectiveness on systems code remains underexplored. Due to the size and complexities of systems code, making changes to a systems codebase is a daunting task, even for humans. It requires researching about many pieces of context, derived from the large codebase and its massive commit history, before making changes. Inspired by the recent progress on deep research agents, we design the fi…

PARK: Personalized academic retrieval with knowledge-graphs
Pranav Kasela, Gabriella Pasi, Raffaele Perego
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13910 https://…

PARK: Personalized academic retrieval with knowledge-graphs
Academic Search is a search task aimed to manage and retrieve scientific documents like journal articles and conference papers. Personalization in this context meets individual researchers' needs by leveraging, through user profiles, the user related information (e.g. documents authored by a researcher), to improve search effectiveness and to reduce the information overload. While citation graphs are a valuable means to support the outcome of recommender systems, their use in personalized acade…

Machinika: Atlas (PC/Mobile, XPd on PC)
You've just landed on the Atlas. Can you solve the puzzles and get this alien vessel working again?
This is another adventure/puzzle game, and is a direct sequel to Machinika: Museum. While you'd miss out on some back story context, I don't know that you HAVE to play the first game to understand this one. But it's also on Steam so if you wanna you can.
This game is much more Myst-inspired than Birth. It's a smaller …

Immigration Raid Tracking App ‘ICE Block’ Keeps Your Data Private, Researcher Finds https://www.404media.co/immigration-raid-tracking-app-ice-block-keeps-your-data-private-researcher-finds/

Emotions in the archives: study scoops international award https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/emotions-in-the-archives-study-scoops-international-award/

Emotions in the archives: study scoops international award - The National Archives
The editors of a ground-breaking new study about emotions and archives which includes work by a researcher at The National Archives has won a prestigious award. Archives and Emotions: International Dialogues across Past, Present and Future won the Waldo Gifford Leland Award for excellent writing and usefulness for archivists. The study examines the role emotions […]

from my link log —
Why Metropolis–Hastings works.
https://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2019/11/02/metropolis-hastings/#bishop2006pattern
saved 2025-08-11

[Thread] An OpenAI researcher says the company's latest experimental reasoning LLM achieved gold medal-level performance on the 2025 International Math Olympiad (Alexander Wei/@alexwei_)
https://x.com/alexwei_/status/1946477742855532918

Alexander Wei (@alexwei_) on X
1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO).

Combining stated and revealed preferences
Romuald Meango, Marc Henry, Ismael Mourifie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13552 https://arxiv.…

Combining stated and revealed preferences
Can stated preferences inform counterfactual analyses of actual choice? This research proposes a novel approach to researchers who have access to both stated choices in hypothetical scenarios and actual choices, matched or unmatched. The key idea is to use stated choices to identify the distribution of individual unobserved heterogeneity. If this unobserved heterogeneity is the source of endogeneity, the researcher can correct for its influence in a demand function estimation using actual choic…

Assessing students understanding of the concept of electric potential difference based on the SOLO taxonomy in upper-secondary students for a targeted assessment
Rahmani Fateme, Ahmadi Kalateh Fatemeh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13723

Assessing students understanding of the concept of electric potential difference based on the SOLO taxonomy in upper-secondary students for a targeted assessment
The concept of potential difference is fundamental to understanding electricity in upper secondary physics courses. However, students often find it challenging to grasp. To address this, we designed and implemented a test aimed at assessing students comprehension of potential difference. This researcher developed test, with a reliability coefficient of 0.74, was administered to 92 students in grades 11 and 12. To evaluate the test and gauge the depth of student learning, we employed the Structu…

Not so much, really.
This is yet another case of an academic setting up a very special circumstance that doesn’t match the real world to create a “vulnerability” that is never going to be used in the real world.
Ever been in a proper data center? Was it quiet?
#InfoSec

Mein toller neuer Kollege Christoph Sander startet demnächst sein ERC-Projekt @… bei uns am CERES @…. Eine erste Promotionsstelle (75%, 3 Jahre) ist schon ausgeschrieben:

PhD researcher (m/f/x)

Nondistortionary belief elicitation
Marcin P\k{e}ski, Colin Stewart
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12167 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12167…

Nondistortionary belief elicitation
A researcher wants to ask a decision-maker about a belief related to a choice the decision-maker made; examples include eliciting confidence or cognitive uncertainty. When can the researcher provide incentives for the decision-maker to report her belief truthfully without distorting her choice? We identify necessary and sufficient conditions for nondistortionary elicitation and fully characterize all incentivizable questions in three canonical classes of problems. For these problems, we show ho…

Sources: OpenAI researcher Jason Wei, who worked on o3 and deep research models, and his colleague Hyung Won Chung are joining Meta's new superintelligence lab (Kylie Robison/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/jason-wei-open-ai-meta/

Another High-Profile OpenAI Researcher Departs for Meta
Jason Wei, who worked on OpenAI’s o3 and deep research models, will be joining Meta’s superintelligence lab. His colleague Hyung Won Chung is also joining Meta, a source tells WIRED.

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
An addendum to this: I'm someone who would accurately be called "anti-AI" in the modern age, yet I'm also an "AI researcher" in some ways (have only dabbled in neutral nets).
I don't like:
- AI systems that are the product of labor abuses towards the data workers who curate their training corpora.
- AI systems that use inordinate amounts of water and energy during an intensifying climate catastrophe.
- AI systems that are fundamentally untrustworthy and which reinforce and amplify human biases, *especially* when those systems are exposed in a way that invites harms.
- AI systems which are designed to "save" my attention or brain bandwidth but such my doing so cripple my understating of the things I might use them for when I fact that understanding was the thing I was supposed to be using my time to gain, and where the later lack of such understanding will be costly to me.
- AI systems that are designed by and whose hype fattens the purse of people who materially support genocide and the construction of concentration campus (a.k.a. fascists).
In other words, I do not like and except in very extenuating circumstances I will not use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
On the other hand, I do like:
- AI research as an endeavor to discover new technologies.
- Generative AI as a research topic using a spectrum of different methods.
- Speculating about non-human intelligences, including artificial ones, and including how to behave ethically towards them.
- Large language models as a specific technique, and autoencoders and other neural networks, assuming they're used responsibly in terms of both resource costs & presentation to end users.
I write this because I think some people (especially folks without CS backgrounds) may feel that opposing AI for all the harms it's causing runs the risk of opposing technological innovation more broadly, and/or may feel there's a risk that they will be "left behind" as everyone else embraces the hype and these technologies inevitability become ubiquitous and essential (I know I feel this way sometimes). Just know that is entirely possible and logically consistent to both oppose many forms of modern AI while also embracing and even being optimistic about AI research, and that while LLMs are currently all the rage, they're not the endpoint of what AI will look like in the future, and their downsides are not inherent in AI development.

Aquifer system faces decline in multiple regions, study shows #Washington

Aquifer system faces decline in multiple regions, study shows
Groundwater is declining across Eastern Washington's complex, interconnected aquifer system, as people draw on it for irrigation, drinking and other uses at a pace that threatens its sustainability, according to a new study by a Washington State University researcher.

Enjoyed this interview with UX researcher Ben Taels. He talks a lot about what games ux research is as well as what it's not. Some high level goals and some specific examples.
https://aftermath.site/video-games-user-experience-ux-r…

'Dopamine Simply Doesn't Work Like That': An Interview With A User Experience Researcher - Aftermath
Part of the reason I have worked in games UXR and not, say, microwave UX, is that games can be designed to be hard

A survey of Chernoff and Hoeffding bounds
Alexandros V. Gerbessiotis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15612 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.1561…

A survey of Chernoff and Hoeffding bounds
This is a survey paper that discusses the original bounds of the seminal papers by Chernoff and Hoeffding. Moreover, it includes a variety of derivative bounds in a variety of forms. Complete proofs are provided as needed. The intent is to provide a repository of reference bounds for the interested researcher.

Movie idea: Under the mistaken belief that all costs were covered by a Read & Publish agreement, a researcher publishes an open access article in a journal. However, he then discovers that color figures aren’t covered, and now he owes the Cartel over 1600 Swiss francs. The chase is on as the Cartel is determined to get their hands on the money, no matter what.
#AcademicChatter…

Movie idea: Under the mistaken belief that all costs were covered by a Read & Publish agreement, a researcher publishes an open access article in a journal. However, he then discovers that color figures aren’t covered, and now he owes the Cartel over 1600 Swiss francs. The chase is on as the Cartel is determined to get their hands on the money, no matter what.
#AcademicChatter…

Movie idea: Under the mistaken belief that all costs were covered by a Read & Publish agreement, a researcher publishes an open access article in a journal. However, he then discovers that color figures aren’t covered, and now he owes the Cartel over 1600 Swiss francs. The chase is on as the Cartel is determined to get their hands on the money, no matter what.
#AcademicChatter…

Mittlerweile ist es ja fast langweilig, noch ein Beispiel und noch ein Beispiel dafür zu sehen, wie die #Datenkartelle wie #Elsevier den wissenschaftlichen Diskurs verrotten lassen - aber wir wissen, was in der jetzigen Situation auf dem Spiel steht.

MAEBE: Multi-Agent Emergent Behavior Framework
Sinem Erisken (Independent Researcher), Timothy Gothard (Independent Researcher), Martin Leitgab (Independent Researcher), Ram Potham (Independent Researcher)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03053

MAEBE: Multi-Agent Emergent Behavior Framework
Traditional AI safety evaluations on isolated LLMs are insufficient as multi-agent AI ensembles become prevalent, introducing novel emergent risks. This paper introduces the Multi-Agent Emergent Behavior Evaluation (MAEBE) framework to systematically assess such risks. Using MAEBE with the Greatest Good Benchmark (and a novel double-inversion question technique), we demonstrate that: (1) LLM moral preferences, particularly for Instrumental Harm, are surprisingly brittle and shift significantly …

A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account https://www.404media.co/a-researcher-figured-out-how-to-reveal-any-phone-number-linked-to-a-google-account/

Jonas Juul is a new member of the Danish Young Academy
https://nerds.itu.dk/2025/06/10/jonas-juul-is-a-new-member-of-the-danish-young-academy/
Congrats @…

AI-Based Reconstruction from Inherited Personal Data: Analysis, Feasibility, and Prospects
Mark Zilberman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03059 https://

AI-Based Reconstruction from Inherited Personal Data: Analysis, Feasibility, and Prospects
This article explores the feasibility of creating an "electronic copy" of a deceased researcher by training artificial intelligence (AI) on the data stored in their personal computers. By analyzing typical data volumes on inherited researcher computers, including textual files such as articles, emails, and drafts, it is estimated that approximately one million words are available for AI training. This volume is sufficient for fine-tuning advanced pre-trained models like GPT-4 to replicate a res…

Fiducial Matching: Differentially Private Inference for Categorical Data
Ogonnaya Michael Romanus, Younes Boulaguiem, Roberto Molinari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11762

Fiducial Matching: Differentially Private Inference for Categorical Data
The task of statistical inference, which includes the building of confidence intervals and tests for parameters and effects of interest to a researcher, is still an open area of investigation in a differentially private (DP) setting. Indeed, in addition to the randomness due to data sampling, DP delivers another source of randomness consisting of the noise added to protect an individual's data from being disclosed to a potential attacker. As a result of this convolution of noises, in many cases…

Nutzt hier wer #BusyBox? Eine Lücke in tar kann genutzt werden um Geräte zum Absturz zu bringen oder sich root-rechte zu verschaffen. BusyBox findet sich auf vielen Embedded-Geräten wie Routern (z.B. #OpenWRT),

The presentations at the 2nd #AAS246 presser were about the papers https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc911 (Discovery of the Seven-ring Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Cyanocoronene (C24H11CN) in GOTHAM Observations of TMC-1, also https://public.nrao.edu/news/cosmic-chemistry-breakthrough-largest-aromatic-molecule-found-in-deep-space/), https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05575 (A map of the outer gas disk of the Galaxy with direct distances from young stars, also https://www.uah.edu/news/items/uah-researcher-unveils-new-map-of-milky-way-galaxy-in-atomic-hydrogen-revealing-its-clumped-flocculent-nature-for-first-time) and https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adbbd9 (Surveying the Giant H ii Regions of the Milky Way with SOFIA. VII. Galactic Center Regions Sgr B1, Sgr B2, and Sgr C, also https://www.seti.org/press-release/unusual-stellar-nurseries-near-our-galaxys-center-puzzle-scientists) plus two results with apparently neither papers nor press releases going with them.

Long-term independent use of an intracortical brain-computer interface for speech and cursor control https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.26.661591v1
I just checked: at least one of the congenitally blind users of The vOICe has been using The vOICe for over…

Long-term independent use of an intracortical brain-computer interface for speech and cursor control
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide naturalistic communication and digital access to people with severe paralysis by decoding neural activity associated with attempted speech and movement. Recent work has demonstrated highly accurate intracortical BCIs for speech and cursor control, but two critical capabilities needed for practical viability were unmet: independent at-home operation without researcher assistance, and reliable long-term performance supporting accurate speech and cursor…

“Terracotta’s porous surface
allows water to slowly evaporate,
carrying heat away and cooling the space around it,”
says Adithya Pradyumna,
an environmental health researcher at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru.
Drawing on this principle, architects in India’s sprawling metro areas
are turning to terracotta for new passive cooling solutions
that range from clay refrigerators to perforated tiles,
ventilated screens, and facades
that al…

Terracotta Is a 3,000-Year-Old Solution to Fighting Extreme Heat
Companies are adapting this humble clay-based ceramic to keep people cool—without electricity

NIH cuts tracked by researchers in Grant Watch database | STAT
https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/27/nih-cuts-tracked-in-grant-watch-database-q-and-a-with-harvard-researcher-scott-delaney/

Source: Meta has hired highly influential OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal to work on its AI reasoning models under the company's new AI superintelligence unit (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/26/meta-hi…

Meta hires key OpenAI researcher to work on AI reasoning models | TechCrunch
Meta has hired a key OpenAI researcher to work on AI reasoning models under its new AI superintelligence unit.

The argument that the market will solve the housing crisis if only we remove barriers like zoning looks weaker and weaker all the time. Why invest in affordable housing if the same investment can capture high-end prices?
https://www.

The argument that the market will solve the housing crisis if only we remove barriers like zoning looks weaker and weaker all the time. Why invest in affordable housing if the same investment can capture high-end prices?
https://www.

Interested in #IntellectualHistory, #NeoLatin, and/or #DigitalHumanities? Looking for a funded PhD position (3 years, 75%)? Come join my excellent colleague Christoph Sander and his

PhD researcher (m/f/x)

Explore, Listen, Inspect: Supporting Multimodal Interaction with 3D Surface and Point Data Visualizations
Sanchita S. Kamath, Aziz N. Zeidieh, JooYoung Seo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08554

Explore, Listen, Inspect: Supporting Multimodal Interaction with 3D Surface and Point Data Visualizations
Blind and low-vision (BLV) users remain largely excluded from three-dimensional (3D) surface and point data visualizations due to the reliance on visual interaction. Existing approaches inadequately support non-visual access, especially in browser-based environments. This study introduces DIXTRAL, a hosted web-native system, co-designed with BLV researchers to address these gaps through multimodal interaction. Conducted with two blind and one sighted researcher, this study took place over susta…

Irgendwie eine ganz gute Beobachtung von Carina Haupt: beim Coden mit LLM produziert man "im Grunde legacy code", den man nur halb durchdringt bzw. durchdringen mag.
Code for Thought: [DE] Software entwickeln mit KI? Ein Gespräch mit Carina Haupt und Chris Stenkamp
Starting from: 00:29:31
Episode webpage: https://pwe…

Back from #ic2s2 which was again a fantastic conference experience - congrats to the organizers! Some professors got a poster this time, which was actually super fun to design and present - haven't done it since my 1st year of PhD 16 years ago 👴

Across Europe, the financial sector has pushed up house prices. It’s a political timebomb
"While housing lies at the heart of political disillusionment today, it is for the same reason becoming a primary trigger for mobilisation across Europe. In October 2024, 150,000 protesters marched through the streets of Madrid demanding action. Some governments, including Denmark and the Netherlands, are introducing policies to deter speculators. But real estate capital continues to hold the…

The Fused Kernel Library: A C API to Develop Highly-Efficient GPU Libraries
Oscar Amoros (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), Albert Andaluz (Independent researcher), Johnny Nunez (NVIDIA), Antonio J. Pena (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07071

The Fused Kernel Library: A C++ API to Develop Highly-Efficient GPU Libraries
Existing GPU libraries often struggle to fully exploit the parallel resources and on-chip memory (SRAM) of GPUs when chaining multiple GPU functions as individual kernels. While Kernel Fusion (KF) techniques like Horizontal Fusion (HF) and Vertical Fusion (VF) can mitigate this, current library implementations often require library developers to manually create fused kernels. Hence, library users rely on limited sets of pre-compiled or template-based fused kernels. This limits the use cases tha…

Every company or government should think about this, prepare exit and contingency plans. Also for other dependencies.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/26/cost_of_microsoft_dependency/

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency
Comment: Czech researcher lays out a business case for reducing reliance on Redmond

"It's "#ORCID and…," not "ORCID or…": How researcher identifiers work together to help researchers, build a better picture of research, and streamline administrative tasks": White Paper by MoreBrains › https://

LeanExplore: A search engine for Lean 4 declarations
Justin Asher (Independent Researcher)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11085 https://a…

LeanExplore: A search engine for Lean 4 declarations
The expanding Lean 4 ecosystem poses challenges for navigating its vast libraries. This paper introduces LeanExplore, a search engine for Lean 4 declarations. LeanExplore enables users to semantically search for statements, both formally and informally, across select Lean 4 packages (including Batteries, Init, Lean, Mathlib, PhysLean, and Std). This search capability is powered by a hybrid ranking strategy, integrating scores from a multi-source semantic embedding model (capturing conceptual me…

Ransomware Group Anubis has leaked what they extracted from Disneyland Paris
#ransomware

Ransomware.live 👀
Ransomware.live tracks ransomware groups and their activity. It was created by Julien Mousqueton, a security researcher. The website provides information on the groups' infrastructure, victims, and payment demands. It also includes a live map that shows the latest ransomware attacks.

Transformer-Based Explainable Deep Learning for Breast Cancer Detection in Mammography: The MammoFormer Framework
Ojonugwa Oluwafemi Ejiga Peter, Daniel Emakporuena, Bamidele Dayo Tunde, Maryam Abdulkarim, Abdullahi Bn Umar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06137

Transformer-Based Explainable Deep Learning for Breast Cancer Detection in Mammography: The MammoFormer Framework
Breast cancer detection through mammography interpretation remains difficult because of the minimal nature of abnormalities that experts need to identify alongside the variable interpretations between readers. The potential of CNNs for medical image analysis faces two limitations: they fail to process both local information and wide contextual data adequately, and do not provide explainable AI (XAI) operations that doctors need to accept them in clinics. The researcher developed the MammoFormer…

HLTCOE at LiveRAG: GPT-Researcher using ColBERT retrieval
Kevin Duh, Eugene Yang, Orion Weller, Andrew Yates, Dawn Lawrie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22356 …

HLTCOE at LiveRAG: GPT-Researcher using ColBERT retrieval
The HLTCOE LiveRAG submission utilized the GPT-researcher framework for researching the context of the question, filtering the returned results, and generating the final answer. The retrieval system was a ColBERT bi-encoder architecture, which represents a passage with many dense tokens. Retrieval used a local, compressed index of the FineWeb10-BT collection created with PLAID-X, using a model fine-tuned for multilingual retrieval. Query generation from context was done with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct…

"Wind farms important to achieving net zero, says researcher"
#WindTurbines #Energy #Renewables #NetZero

Wind farms important to achieving net zero, says researcher
Few energy technologies divide public opinion quite like wind turbines. To some, they are elegant icons of the green transition, while others proclaim them to be monstrous eyesores that ruin the landscape. Whether you love them or hate them, one thing is clear: if the UK is to meet its net zero target by 2050, then wind power will have to play a dominant role in getting us there. Policy makers have signaled their commitment, having recently approved one of the largest wind farms in the world to…

Researcher: a DOGE staffer inadvertently published a private API key for xAI on GitHub on July 13, exposing access to 52 LLMs, including "grok-4-0709" (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/07/doge-denizen-marko-elez-le…

We’re witnessing unprecedented attempts to bully academic institutions with the administration’s ideological aims.
These attempts challenge long-standing norms of academic freedom
—that is, the ability of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss subjects without fear of political interference.
Our elected officials should stand up for scientific research and those who produce it in the face of politically motivated attacks.
But public a…

Apathy Over Attacks on Higher Education Needs to Change
If Americans don’t fight back against efforts to dismantle higher education, the U.S. will lose lifesaving medical research, innovation that spurs our economy and the ability to freely study science and society

SpeechVerifier: Robust Acoustic Fingerprint against Tampering Attacks via Watermarking
Lingfeng Yao (University of Houston), Chenpei Huang (University of Houston), Shengyao Wang (Waseda University), Junpei Xue (Waseda University), Hanqing Guo (University of Hawaii at M\=anoa), Jiang Liu (Waseda University), Xun Chen (Independent Researcher), Miao Pan (University of Houston)

SpeechVerifier: Robust Acoustic Fingerprint against Tampering Attacks via Watermarking
With the surge of social media, maliciously tampered public speeches, especially those from influential figures, have seriously affected social stability and public trust. Existing speech tampering detection methods remain insufficient: they either rely on external reference data or fail to be both sensitive to attacks and robust to benign operations, such as compression and resampling. To tackle these challenges, we introduce SpeechVerifer to proactively verify speech integrity using only the …

Advancement of Circular Economy Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Bibliometric Approach
Keita Nishimoto, Koji Kimita, Shinsuke Murakami, Yin Long, Kimitaka Asatani, Ichiro Sakata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04923

Advancement of Circular Economy Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Bibliometric Approach
Since the European Union introduced its Circular Economy (CE) Action Plan in 2015, CE research has expanded rapidly. However, the structure of this emerging field - both in terms of its constituent disciplines and researcher dynamics - remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we analyze over 25,000 CE-related publications from Scopus by combining conventional bibliometric approaches with advanced machine learning techniques, including text embeddings and clustering. This hybrid method en…

Not racist or xenophobic. Samples of a #Fusarium species not native to the hemisphere. It *could* absolutely be a non-malicious stupid grad student trick, but it was a dangerous one with incalculable risk.
Crop pathogens make history.

Scott MacFarlane
ALERT: Detention hearing scheduled for 1pm tomorrow for University of Michigan researcher Yunqing Jian, who is accused of conspiracy to smuggle potential "agroterrorism weapon" into the US Jian's co-defendant, a Chinese national, in NOT in custody

Björn Müller, researcher at #MPSGoettingen and #IMPRS at #UniGoettingen graduate, has been awarded the Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding achievements in his dissertation. The

Q&A with researcher Petter Törnberg on his pre-print study showing how social media's structural architecture creates problematic outcomes like echo chambers (Jennifer Ouellette/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-medi…

Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed
“The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve.”…

Adam Dorr concluded that the current AI wave will not just convulse -- but obliterate the labour market by 2045.
What cars did to horses and carts, and electricity to gas lamps, and digital cameras to Kodak, are templates for the coming shock, he says.
“Technology has a new target in its crosshairs – and that’s us. That’s our labour.”
Some sectors will have an interregnum during which humans can work effectively alongside robots
– just like the period when chess gr…

Sources: Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google DeepMind, is expected to join Meta's "superintelligence" team, as well as an ML lead from Sesame AI (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

House prices and markets and uses of residential units:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/25/lisbon-europe-portugal-golden-visa-capital-investors-short-term-re…

House prices and markets and uses of residential units:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/25/lisbon-europe-portugal-golden-visa-capital-investors-short-term-re…

Judgment as Coordination: A Joint Systems View of Visualization Design Practice
Paul C. Parsons, Arran Ridley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01209 https://

Judgment as Coordination: A Joint Systems View of Visualization Design Practice
Professional visualization design has become an increasingly important area of inquiry, yet much of the field's discourse remains anchored in researcher-centered contexts. Studies of design practice often focus on individual designers' decisions and reflections, offering limited insight into the collaborative and systemic dimensions of professional work. In this paper, we propose a systems-level reframing of design judgment grounded in the coordination and adaptation that sustain progress amid …

AI-focused hedge funds raise billions, such as ex-OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness that amassed $1.5B for a "brain trust on AI" (Peter Rudegeair/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/bill…

Hackers Can Remotely Trigger the Brakes on American Trains and the Problem Has Been Ignored for Years https://www.404media.co/hackers-can-remotely-trigger-the-brakes-on-american-trains-and-the-problem-has-been-ignored-f…

A researcher says 245 extensions on nearly 1M devices are overriding security protections to turn browsers into engines that scrape websites for a paid service (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/

Browser extensions turn nearly 1 million browsers into website-scraping bots
Extensions load unknown sites into invisible Windows. What could go wrong?

New around here, hi!
For those who'd like a big old dose of "yes we can" energy,
please check out
"Words to Win By "
where every episode details a campaign we've won somewhere
and delves into the research, messaging & strategies used to do it.
https://wordstowinby-pod.com/

Words to Win By
Words to Win By, formerly Brave New Words, takes listeners on a journey around the globe with renowned communications researcher and campaign advisor Anat Shenker-Osorio as she unpacks real-world narrative shifts that led to real-world victories.

Our Galaxy May Contain a Mysterious Force. It Could Change Physics Forever. https://www.404media.co/our-galaxy-may-contain-a-mysterious-force-it-could-change-physics-forever/

Sources: the researcher who declined Zuckerberg's offer of a $1.5B package over six years is Thinking Machines co-founder and ex-Meta staffer Andrew Tulloch (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-zuckerber

AI researcher salaries are steadily rising, with total pay packages of $500K to $2M at Big Tech for mid to senior level staffers, up from $400K to $900K in 2022 (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/d48e7cfe-7b04-4cdd-8769-c88c83522118

AI talent wars lead to superstar salaries for top tech staff
OpenAI says it will review its compensation to high-profile engineers after being targeted by Meta

Daniel Gross is leaving Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup he co-founded with Ilya Sutskever, to join Meta's new superintelligence lab (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-03/meta-hi…

CISA, Microsoft issue alerts on ‘high-severity’ Exchange vulnerability https://therecord.media/microsoft-exchange-server-vulnerability-cisa-alert

Tel Aviv-based Speedata, which is designing analytics processing units for big data workloads, raised a $44M Series B, aims to showcase its first APU this month (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/speedata…

Speedata, a chip startup competing with Nvidia, raises a $44M Series B | TechCrunch
Speedata, a Tel Aviv-based startup developing an analytics processing unit (APU) designed to accelerate big data analytic and AI workloads, has raised a Founded by six researcher, Speedata wants to build the first-ever purpose-build chip designed specifically for big data workloads.

Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google https://www.404media.co/nearly-100-000-chatgpt-conversations-were-searchable-on-google/

Sources: Apple loses a fourth AI researcher in a month to Meta's superintelligence team; the AFM team is in flux and Apple has marginally increased their pay (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Mark Zuckerberg announces that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will be chief scientist at Meta's new superintelligence lab (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/25/mark-zuckerberg-details-metas-superintelligence-plans

Mark Zuckerberg details Meta's superintelligence plans
Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement on Threads.

Source: Yann LeCun will continue to work at Meta as chief scientist of the AI research group FAIR and will report to Alexandr Wang (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-25/meta-says-open-ai…

Meta Says Open AI Hire is Superintelligence Group Chief Scientist
Mark Zuckerberg has named Shengjia Zhao, an artificial intelligence researcher who joined Meta Platforms Inc. from OpenAI in June, as the chief scientist for the social media company’s new superintelligence AI group.