@aaronclauset
NO KINGS. NO FASCISTS. FUND SCIENCE. Professor of Computer Science @ BioFrontiers Institute at University of Colorado, Boulder and External Faculty @ Santa Fe Institute orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3529-8746
A few people have asked for the syllabus from my grad seminar on Generative AI for social science -- just posted it here:
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/10/n...
Happy to share that we have a new paper out based on my PhD research: "Predicting missing links in food webs using stacked models and species traits" with @lauradee.bsky.social, Kate L. Wootton, François Massol, @aaronclauset.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵/1
“A recurring theme across histories of the Red Scares period is that if the faculty had shown solidarity, with a meaningful share of faculty within an institution refusing to sign things like loyalty oaths, the damage to academic freedom could have been averted or greatly lessened.”
Figure 2: Fields vary widely in their consensus around top-5 venues and the general alignment of their prefer- ences. Whether one uses a field-level ranking constructed from the pairwise comparisons of all respondents in a field to predict an individual’s pairwise comparisons (horizontal axis) or assesses the degree to which individuals in a field agree on a top-5 (vertical axis), some fields (e.g. Economics) demonstrate a much more overlapping and organized set of preferences than others (e.g. Computer science).
Academic fields differ in their degree of consensus about what "better" publication venues are — here shown both for consensus about the "top 5" and for pairwise choices.
Hello #econsky :)
arxiv.org/abs/2603.00807
@jugander.bsky.social @danlarremore.bsky.social @aaronclauset.bsky.social
Serving as an editor taught me the limits of academic ideals for open, accessible scholarship, which tend to get smashed into the cliffs of institutional inertia, profit motives, and extractive norms. Some orgs are better than others, but their base tendencies are varying degrees of parasitism 🔥
Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and identify new research partners across academic fields? Apply to one of the 2026 Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (described in yellow in the attached map) here: sicss.io/locations
FWIW, this is sec. 2(c) of the War Powers Resolution:
For people who still care about this sort of thing, here's James Madison writing from 1793 (6 years after the delegates in Philadelphia signed the Constitution) about why the power to make war was vested in the legislature.
press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/doc...
The Program Committee welcomes submissions on all topics in the science of science and innovation, broadly defined. We invite contributions from researchers and practitioners across all disciplines, sectors, and world regions, with a particular encouragement for early-career scholars. Major conference themes include, but are not limited to: AI, agentic science, and new epistemic practices in scientific discovery Global knowledge dynamics and the evolution of scientific fields Government-industry-academia partnerships and innovation systems Societal impacts and public value of science and innovation Science funding in an interconnected, multi-sectoral, and global environment Social stratification, bias, and ethical issues in scientific production and reward Open science, transparency, and reproducibility in research The scientific workforce, precarity, and the trajectory of research careers Theoretical, historical, and conceptual perspectives on science and innovation Causal inference and methodological advances in the science of science and innovation Science communication, public trust, and the governance of emerging technologies Intellectual property, patents, and the geography of technological change
📣 Call for abstracts at #ICSSI2026
⛰️ in Boulder, CO, USA - June 29 to July 1
📥 Submit here: www.icssi.org/guidelines
⏳ Deadline: March 30th
On any topic relevant to #SciSci #Innovation #ScienceofScience #Metascience #STS
Please repost and share!
An image of beautiful Boulder, CO, USA, with the iconic flatiron rock formations and red roofed campus.
The International Conference on the Science of Science & Innovation #ICSSI2026 will be in beautiful Boulder, CO, USA!
☀️ June 29 - July 1 ☀️
& Open Data Hackathon, June 28 🧑💻
We welcome submissions on all topics in the science of science and innovation, broadly defined.
Learn more at 👉 icssi.org 👈
Abstract submissions close on March 3rd!
We are also extending a ✨ call for mentored reviewers ✨ if you advise excellent graduate or postdoctoral researchers you are welcome to recommend them to review for IC2S2 2026. Email IC2S2@uvm.edu to nominate mentored reviewers (or faculty colleagues)
It was a lot of fun building this tool! Something that can help faculty with a small but tedious step in preparing an NSF grant proposal: the conflict of interests spreadsheet. Drag-and-drop simplicity ftw 🚤
This works! For those of us with . . . large . . . COA lists, game changer!
According to this, 372 co-authors and collaborators!
Screenshot of the COI Pond webpage: Upload your academic CV and generate a draft NSF Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) Form to submit with your NSF grant proposals. COI Pond parses your CV to extract: Coauthors of articles published, in the last 48 months Collaborators on funded projects, in last 48 months Past PhD advisees & your own PhD advisor(s) Editorial roles, in last 24 months After extraction, you can edit the draft COA form before downloading a final version (in xslx format) that you can submit to NSF. COI Pond is a free tool* from Cevian Labs.
Today we’re excited to announce a new product: COI Pond is a tool for faculty and grant staff that converts an academic CV into a draft NSF Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) Form. COA forms are tedious work, and COI Pond makes it a snap. Try it for free, here cevianlabs.io/coipond/start/ /1
A great meditation on how AI assistance might change how science is done and how we evaluate "rigor." It's not clear! Much depends on our figuring out how to collectively avoid substituting AI work ("reckoning") for human scientific judgement. Read to the end for a great use of a Tukey quote.
the deadline to submit to the WiNS satellite & mentorship program at @netsciconf.bsky.social is this friday!!
I find the marketing around AI, starting with OpenAI’s original push around selling chatGPT to be absolutely fascinating. Arguably one of the most successful campaigns ever — they convinced the world that (basically) they’d invented magic / god. Incredible!
It’s okay. You don’t have to be excited about it. I can be excited enough for the both of us
mRNA vaccines are programmable vaccines, and they’re now being used in personalized cancer treatments, as well as treating a number of other previously hard-to-treat diseases. Basically, they dramatically expand the range of diseases that can be hit with immunotherapy
Is there a technology the left is excited about?
⚙️ Working at the intersection of causality and networks?
We're organizing a satellite event at @netsciconf.bsky.social in Boston on June 1st. The focus is networks science and causal inference.
Submit your work by March 10th!
causnets.github.io
From what their website says, none of the 8-member CU “AI working group” had any CS or AI (or ethics…) expertise, and the majority were upper administrators or in IT. I think no faculty governance groups or experts were consulted
This is correct, but open records laws have not previously extended so deeply into basic research and teaching work. If these tools are *useful*, it will expose so much more of that messy work to surveillance and political agents with bad faith intentions
Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.
The number of student full-rides is my go-to metric: How many students did hiring this Ass. Dean cost? This Ass. Vice Chancellor? This 3-year IT contract? This football coach?
Or, how many new assistant professors are we losing by paying this senior administrator? #stayangry
My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity
www.axios.com/local/boulde...
My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity
www.axios.com/local/boulde...
“As university leadership signals a willingness to purge and sanction political dissidents, the question remains what powerful organizations like the AAU will do. As the historian Howard Zinn opined, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
Essential article from @lopatto.bsky.social about how the Epstein files unmask the #metoo / #antiwoke handwringing and backslash as a scramble to avoid accountability.
Hey AI, please rewrite my shitpost in the style of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” 🔥