iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

So what's the deal with GPT-6 Astra/Fable 5.1? What is "computer use" and why is it such a big deal right now? Are we at AGI/RSI?? Swing by for another round of AI Office Hours this Thursday, 2-3pm ET to learn more about all of the above (and anything else you bring) as the field continues to shift

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Very, very excited about this collaboration: If you’re an Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management member and/or planning to attend their Fall Conference, I’m going to be offering: (1) My intro series of workshops for attendees on responsible AI for policy research...

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Why does it feel like AI assistants can suddenly do... everything right now? Lesson 3 of my fully-free AI Academy is out: the biggest buzzwords of 2026 (agents, tools, harnesses, context engineering) demystified in plain English, in 18 minutes flat! openaugments.org/academy#l1-05

openaugments.org

Open Augments AI Academy - A Free, Interactive AI Course for Everyone

A fully-free, interactive course on using AI responsibly and effectively. Short weekly video lessons and hands-on demos -- no jargon and no experience required.

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Lesson 2 of the fully-free Open Augments AI Academy is out today: "How to Make AI Less Bad: Context Is Everything" First, HUGE thanks to folks for sharing and digging in: the course launched just a week ago, and we're on track break a thousand subscribers on YouTube today or tomorrow. W I L D.

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Over the past six months, I've been teaching teams at places like Stanford, Penn, Northwestern, and many more how to start using AI responsibly+effectively in their work. Today, I'm starting to release my entire curriculum: for free, forever, for everyone!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Re-upping for the group: Next session is this Thursday, August 13th! We've got folks across institutions and industries, and we had a great last session talking through things like getting Claude to run more careful and rigorous web searching on your behalf Would love to see you there. Swing on by!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Quick re-up: First AI office hours session is today from 2-3pm ET! Already looking like a fantastic group with representation across over a dozen institutions. Register below for this one or future ones!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I've run intensive workshops on best practices for responsible and rigorous AI adoption for well over 500 researchers+academics over the past few months. The Q&A after my workshops are some of the most fun and productive conversations I've had, so I figure: let's make this its own regular thing!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

🥳DAAF v3.0.0 is out today!! The two headliners: DAAF now speaks fluent R, and it can now ALSO run on your ChatGPT subscription/API key (Yes, GPT-5.6 inside Claude Code!). The whole release is about greatly expanding who DAAF is for across the social sciences. daafguide.substack.com/p/new-daaf-v...

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Joshua Goodman @joshua-goodman.com · 13/07/2026

Our @wheelockpolicybu.bsky.social group was thrilled to have @brhkim.bsky.social run workshops on AI for social science research. Many of our students/faculty have already gone from casual usage to deeper, more thoughtful engagement with the tools agentic AI now brings. Highly recommend!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

AI can help us think *more* critically and *more* deeply, not less, and it's urgent that we start cultivating that practice for ourselves and our students. Lessons from a former English teacher battling SparkNotes: daafguide.substack.com/p/on-rethink... #EduSky #AIinEducation #HigherEd #AcademicSky

daafguide.substack.com

On rethinking coursework expectations in the era of AI: Raising the floor and the ceiling

What we can learn from high school English teachers and frontier AI model benchmarking

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I've been running workshops on AI for academics across the country the past few months, and the same question has come up in every single room: So... what are we going to do about teaching? No easy answers, but I want to offer a few distilled suggestions: daafguide.substack.com/p/on-rethink...

daafguide.substack.com

On rethinking coursework expectations in the era of AI: Raising the floor and the ceiling

What we can learn from high school English teachers and frontier AI model benchmarking

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Added GLM 5.2 to DAAFBench, and it's so good it required a complete rewrite of the key takeaways and recs. It is utterly indistinguishable from Opus 4.5/4.6/4.8 at 25-33% of the cost and open-weight. What a wild week. Kimi K2.7 Coder also added in, but frankly unimpressive!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I ran 17 different frontier models through 51 different tests (2500 total runs!) to examine: How well do different AI models handle the complexities of rigorous quantitative data analysis workflows? Excited to introduce DAAFBench: Orchestration! daaf.openaugments.org/bench

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Maria Diaz Mize @msmariadiaz.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

very cool use of claude code!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

🥳 If you’ve been wondering how to use Claude Code as a quantitative researcher/social scientist of any kind: I’ve *finally* made a very nice, very accessible, and very informative homepage for the Data Analyst Augmentation Framework (DAAF), and I think you'll wanna take a look!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

🥳 DAAF v2.1.0 is live today! With it, I feel strongly that DAAF is now finally the best, safest, AND easiest (+free!) way to get started w/ Claude Code for *any* data work. v2.1.0 was focused on three core features for quality of life and ease of use: daafguide.substack.com/p/daaf-v210-...

daafguide.substack.com

DAAF v2.1.0: The Frictionless Update

In my very biased opinion: DAAF is now the best AND easiest way to get started using Claude Code for researchers

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

🙌 New explainer article! TLDR: Everyone needs to be investing in better logging+monitoring to track model adherence for their workflows, because we can't assume any two models will follow instructions the same way given how weird the AI frontier is right now daafguide.substack.com/p/opus-47-la...

daafguide.substack.com

The Opus 4.7 launch fiasco as a crucial reality check for anyone building with AI in 2026

Do you really know what your AI agents are doing right now?

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

A lot of peeps have asked: What does it actually look like to use DAAF to analyze data? And how is it better v. Claude Code alone? It's exactly the right Q, and so I put together this interactive walkthrough showing every step, doc, and output from a full project! openaugments.org/daaf_anatomy...

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Statistical Horizons @stathorizons.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

We’re excited to co-sponsor Machine Collaborators, a free conversation series led by Charles Crabtree on how researchers are using #AI in their work. Join the 1st session Thur, April 16 at 7pm ET (11pm UTC) as @brhkim.bsky.social discusses accelerating quantitative research w/ AI agents. Learn more:

machinecollaborators.org

Machine Collaborators

A global conversation series on what happens when researchers work with AI.

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

🥳 It's been a month since I launched DAAF, the Data Analyst Augmentation Framework... which means now is great time to celebrate the launch of DAAF v2.0.0 and re-introduce you all to a more useful, usable, and flexible tool for anyone analyzing data in their work!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=747r...

youtube.com

DAAF v2.0.0 -- Responsible, Rigorous, and Reproducible AI-empowered Data Analysis with Claude Code

YouTube video by Brian Heseung Kim (brhkim)

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

youtube.com

DAAF v2.0.0 -- Responsible, Rigorous, and Reproducible AI-empowered Data Analysis with Claude Code

YouTube video by Brian Heseung Kim (brhkim)

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Very exciting: We've got over 150 registrants as of this morning!! If you're interested in getting caught up on the frontiers of using AI for rigorous quantitative research (not just education-specific), I'd love to see you there! #academicsky #academicchatter #econsky #phdsky

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

LLM AI assistants will always be at risk of hallucinating/sycophancy/lying. Can they still be useful for accelerating good research? Yes! But we need a *lot* of guardrails. If you've wanted to learn how to use tools like Claude Code to *responsibly* accelerate quantitative research...

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

As AI tools for research proliferate and research production accelerates, publishing is going to need to split into two tracks in the near future: that which is mechanically reproducible and verifiable, and basically everything else.

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Excited to be spending the rest of the week at AEFP 2026! Lots of exciting opportunities to connect if you want to know where to find me: 1. Running a professional development session on Friday morn to help folks target job applications to non-research organizations for "embedded" researcher roles

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Brazenly irresponsible projects like this are exactly what drove me to develop DAAF vocally centering the human expert. If we don't form strong, principled positions about what good AI-empowered research *can* and *should* look like, we wind up getting dragged around by people who clearly...

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

If AI tooling accelerates research production, how can our current publication systems possibly keep pace? One answer: AI will also allow us to rapidly verify the reproducibility of many claims, and we *must* modernize journals accordingly ASAP (Step 2) #AcademicSky #EduSky #ResearchSky

Title page preview of the substack the main post is linking to: "Peer review is dead; Long live peer review! Six steps towards building a more optimistic AI-empowered future for academia and science, together

Table of contents for the main substack post the author is linking to:
Building the foundation

Step 1. AI-empowered research tooling: AI allows us to rapidly accelerate the production of many scientific claims, and we must center transparency and reproducibility as core requirements

Step 2. AI-empowered reproducibility verification: AI allows us to rapidly verify the mechanical reproducibility of many claims, and we must modernize journals accordingly

Step 3. AI-empowered validity assessment: AI allows us to rapidly critique the appropriateness and rigor of a given claim, and we must make these tools broadly and freely accessible

Creating the new paradigm

Step 4. AI-empowered research dissemination: Leverage AI to rapidly disseminate a wider variety of rigorous, reproducible, and validity-assessed claims to the public when and where it’s most relevant

Step 5. Human expertise where it is needed most: Refocus trusted academic institutions on becoming hubs of verification for complex research insights and research using private data sources

Step 6. Human effort where it is most valuable: Revalue rigorous data collection, robust data infrastructure, and methodological refinements as the highest-impact activities for advancing scientific knowledge

The end of the beginning: Instantaneous knowledge generation/verification and exponential scientific advancement for the public good with all hands on deck

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

How can we get to a more optimistic AI-empowered future for academia and science? Step 1: As AI allows us to accelerate the production of more and more scientific claims, we *must* center transparency and reproducibility as core requirements for all AI research tooling #academicchatter #econsky

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

New long-form explainer post! Why no one can agree about AI progress right now: A three-part mental model for making sense of this weird moment on the AI frontier daafguide.substack.com/p/ai-progres...

daafguide.substack.com

Why no one can agree about AI progress right now

A more useful and practical mental model for thinking about the AI capability frontier

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

Are you a data scientist/researcher trying to figure out how to get started with AI tools like Claude Code -- without sacrificing the transparency, rigor, or reproducibility you know *matters* for producing insights you can actually stand by?

youtu.be

DAAF Complete End-to-End AI Data Analysis Demo in 10 minutes

YouTube video by Brian Heseung Kim (brhkim)

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

🚨Calling all education+social science researchers! 🚨 For the second time ever, Common App is hosting an open Call for Research Proposals to solicit innovative and rigorous research projects using our expansive (& still mostly untapped) data warehouse! www.commonapp.org/files/DAR/Co...

A screenshot of the title page of the Common App Call for Research Proposals, AY 2025-2026. The Executive Summary and main requirements for the Letter of Intent are visible. Exact text can be found at the link in the main post.

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

This tarriffs strategy feels like the foreign trade equivalent of injecting ourselves with bleach to fight an infection and so at least he's being consistent

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Ellen Roche @ellroche.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Disappeared Tufts Human Dev. PhD student Rumesya Ozturk is also a graduate of Teachers College - she’s a dev. psychologist studying children’s media & prosocial development. She also bakes without recipes and binge-watches cartoons. She is our colleague & she was abducted on the street w/ our tax $.

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Rachael Sirianni, PhD @docsirianni.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH

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Reposted by Brian Heseung Kim

AERA @aeraedresearch.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

AERA has just learned that all restricted-use NCES data licenses will be cancelled, possibly as early as March 20. We urgently request that all AERA members and others in the research community with restricted-use licenses take these two actions: www.aera.net/Research-Pol...

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Internet Archive @archive.org · 13/03/2025

🔗 Websites vanish. Links break. But knowledge can live on with your help. Use the Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now tool to archive webpages that are important to you. 🕰️ 💾 📌 Try it now: web.archive.org/save

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Beth Schueler @bethschueler.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

It's that time of year to circulate this list of orgs for those seeking ed policy jobs/internships. Please let me know if there are opportunities/orgs I should add. Good luck out there! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

docs.google.com

The Unofficial List of Ed Policy Orgs for Job/Internship Seekers

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Many thanks to all who engaged in the process -- hoping to make the most of this responsibility and excited to give back to an organization that has been such a home for me for so long!!! Looking forward to seeing many of you soon in DC!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

If this works as well as they say, cross-language work is about to become SOOO much easier

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

Just released: New research from Common App tracking 786,000 STEMM-interested college applicants and their ensuing degrees via rich Common App-NSC data. @sarah-nolan.bsky.social does a *phenomenal* job digging into some much-needed nuance on this front via clever viz and thoughtful analyses!

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Brian Heseung Kim @brhkim.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Quick intro: I'm an education researcher who currently leads the data science and research team at Common App, a national platform for college applications in the U.S. Follow me for: deep dives into college data, computational social science (especially NLP), and all things R and data viz!

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