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Bryan Wilder

@brwilder.bsky.social
1.2K followers 218 following 42 posts

Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Machine Learning and social impact. bryanwilder.github.io

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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Recently, CMU had a great workshop on "AI agency and interpretability", with a mix of philosophers and computer scientists talking about interpreting/understanding AI and safety questions through the lens of rational agency. I wrote up a few reflections on the discussion, linked below.
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
My take on a research agenda that I see emerging and which deserves more attention (link below)
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
This week, I read "After Virtue" by Alasdair MacIntyre (only 45 years late!) Some thoughts about whether LLMs can be virtuous and how successfully the Claude constitution navigates these dilemmas ⬇️
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Do LLMs have beliefs, desires, and so on? I think the answer is probably yes. But more than that, the journey leads to fascinating questions how they solve cognitive tasks and what approaches to safety/alignment could work. Here's a first post (of more to come) thinking through these questions ⬇️
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
About a year ago, I wrote skeptically about LLMs in peer review -- not because of skepticism about their inherent capabilities, but because I don't want the research community to optimize for the taste of any one person/system. What's changed since then?
bryanwilder.substack.com
What’s next for machine learning peer review?
A bit over a year ago, I wrote about the dangers of using LLMs for peer review. The most serious concern I had was algorithmic monoculture: the research community would collectively end up optimizing ...
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
I'm co-chairing the social impact track at AAAI this year, with Andrew Perrault. Send us your best society-facing work! Personally, I'm especially hoping to see more work speaking to mediators of why and when AI has social impact (or not), like how AI fits into human organizations and decisions.
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
CMU's Human-AI complementarity workshop is returning this September! Submit abstracts here by July 17; travel funding is available for accepted presenters. www.cmu.edu/ai-sdm/resea...
cmu.edu
Human-AI Complementarity Workshop - NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making - Carnegie Mellon University
Landing page that provides details for the annual AI-SDM workshop on Human-AI Complementarity for Decision Making
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Deploying algorithmic research in practice is an opaque process. We're organizing a workshop at EC to share behind-the-scenes stories and move the field foward. Call for submissions open! With @nkgarg.bsky.social @ericachiang.bsky.social, Bailey Flanigan sites.google.com/cornell.edu/...
sites.google.com
Home
About This workshop will focus on the practical realities of deploying algorithmic and economic systems from academic research, especially with government and non-profit partners. While economics and ...
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Nikhil Garg @nkgarg.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
The EAAMO conference deadline is coming up! conference.eaamo.org/cfp/ Great community at intersection of CS-Operations-Econ and social good. Flexible publication format (e.g., non-archival option) and so costless to submit here as well!
conference.eaamo.org
Call for Participation
ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
LLMs are increasingly used as agents for decisions under uncertainty, e.g. medical diagnosis. But do they act like rational agents with coherent beliefs and preferences? Much of the difficulty is telling whether a model's response to.a prompt ("What is the probability of X?") is a "real" belief.
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
LLMs are increasingly used as agents for decisions under uncertainty, e.g. medical diagnosis. But do they act like rational agents with coherent beliefs and preferences? Much of the difficulty is telling whether a model's response to.a prompt ("What is the probability of X?") is a "real" belief.
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 05/12/2025
As UKRI explores using LLMs to review grants, it's a good time to revisit Bryan Wilder's excellent blog post. There are a lot of naive reasons to oppose AI review ("you'll never automate human intuition!"). But there are also good reasons, including the *load-bearing role of human disagreement.*
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Come talk to me and Angela at NeurIPS on Friday! We argue that "AI for social impact" needs to get more rigorous about evaluating deployments of AI, but also that there are many other forms of impact that get overlooked right now
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
I gave talks at MIT and Harvard this week about "Science with synthetic data". How can generative models help us learn about the actual world (e.g., social systems) in a principled way? Lots of interesting conversations -- more convinced than ever that there's nuanced issues to navigate here.
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Kate Donahue @kpaxdonahue.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
I’m recruiting students this upcoming cycle at UIUC! I’m excited about Qs on societal impact of AI, especially human-AI collaboration, multi-agent interactions, incentives in data sharing, and AI policy/regulation (all from both a theoretical and applied lens). Apply through CS & select my name!
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
We're in the process of selecting the location for next year's ACM EAAMO conference! If you're interested in bringing the EAAMO community to your institution, please check out the open call here and get in touch. conference.eaamo.org/call_for_loc...
conference.eaamo.org
Call for Proposals: Host the 2026 ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization!
EAAMO is seeking proposals from universities, institutes and other appropriate venues interested in hosting the 2026 ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (AC...
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
How can synthetic data from LLMs be used, e.g. for social science, in a principled way? Check out Emily's thread on our NeurIPS paper! Generating paired real-synthetic samples and using both in a method-of-moments framework enables valid inference that benefits when synthetic data is informative.
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Gabriel Agostini @gsagostini.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Are you a researcher using computational methods to understand cities? @mfranchi.bsky.social @jennahgosciak.bsky.social and I organize an EAAMO Bridges working group on Urban Data Science and we are looking for new members! Fill the interest form on our page: urban-data-science-eaamo.github.io
urban-data-science-eaamo.github.io
Urban Data Science & Equitable Cities | EAAMO Bridges
EAAMO Bridges Urban Data Science & Equitable Cities working group: biweekly talks, paper studies, and workshops on computational urban data analysis to explore and address inequities.
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Nikhil Garg @nkgarg.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
New piece, out in the Sigecom Exchanges! It's my first solo-author piece, and the closest thing I've written to being my "manifesto." #econsky #ecsky arxiv.org/abs/2507.03600
Screenshot of paper abstract, with text: "A core ethos of the Economics and Computation (EconCS) community is that people have complex private preferences and information of which the central planner is unaware, but which an appropriately designed mechanism can uncover to improve collective decisionmaking. This ethos underlies the community’s largest deployed success stories, from stable matching systems to participatory budgeting. I ask: is this choice and information aggregation “worth it”? In particular, I discuss how such systems induce heterogeneous participation: those already relatively advantaged are, empirically, more able to pay time costs and navigate administrative burdens imposed by the mechanisms. I draw on three case studies, including my own work – complex democratic mechanisms, resident crowdsourcing, and school matching. I end with lessons for practice and research, challenging the community to help reduce participation heterogeneity and design and deploy mechanisms that meet a “best of both worlds” north star: use preferences and information from those who choose to participate, but provide a “sufficient” quality of service to those who do not."
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
Submit an abstract to present a poster at EAAMO, deadline July 25! EAAMO is one of my favorite conferences, and a great place for anyone working on ML/algorithms/optimization in social settings. The conference is in Pittsburgh this November. conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for...
conference.eaamo.org
Call for Posters
We seek poster contributions from different fields that offer insights into the intersectional design and impacts of algorithms, optimization, and mechanism design with a grounding in the social scien...
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Amin Rahimian @rahimian.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
ACM EAAMO, which is coming to Pitt this Fall, has two events for students: a doctoral consortium and a poster session, both of which are due July 25th - poster session conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for... - doctoral consortium conference.eaamo.org/cfp/call_for...
conference.eaamo.org
Call for Posters
We seek poster contributions from different fields that offer insights into the intersectional design and impacts of algorithms, optimization, and mechanism design with a grounding in the social scien...
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Excited to share that our paper "Learning treatment effects while treating those in need" received the exemplary paper award for AI at EC 2025! This paper grew out collaborations with Allegheny County's human services department and my co-author Pim Welle (at ACDHS). arxiv.org/abs/2407.07596
arxiv.org
Learning treatment effects while treating those in need
Many social programs attempt to allocate scarce resources to people with the greatest need. Indeed, public services increasingly use algorithmic risk assessments motivated by this goal. However, targe...
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
CMU is hosting a workshop on Human-AI Complementarity for Decision Making this September! Abstract submissions due July 15, travel will be covered for accepted presenters. www.cmu.edu/ai-sdm/resea...
cmu.edu
Human-AI Complementarity Workshop - NSF AI Institute for Societal Decision Making - Carnegie Mellon University
Landing page that provides details for the annual AI-SDM workshop on Human-AI Complementarity for Decision Making
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Nikhil Garg @nkgarg.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
Excited to have this work out at ICML this year! Do LLMs make correlated errors? Yes, and those by the same company, and also more accurate/later generations are more correlated -- increasing algorithmic monoculture arxiv.org/abs/2506.07962
arxiv.org
Correlated Errors in Large Language Models
Diversity in training data, architecture, and providers is assumed to mitigate homogeneity in LLMs. However, we lack empirical evidence on whether different LLMs differ meaningfully. We conduct a larg...
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 28/05/2025
Still thinking about this post. The broader point, which should resonate way beyond the specific issue of "peer review," is that human disagreement is not friction and waste. It's a load-bearing, functional part of social and intellectual systems.
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Sanmay Das @sanmayd.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
Thoughtful take on one aspect of the increasing problem of LLMs leading to “centralization” of thought/writing/etc.
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angela zhou @angelamczhou.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
I didn't know about this, but this is objectively procedurally terrible. See Bryan's great analysis 👇 Yes, peer review needs help, but not like this.
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 26/05/2025
Quite the insightful post about the use of LLMs in peer-review. Since that ship has left the stable, let's understand and mitigate the possible adverse effects. bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev... E.g., "scientists should demand that any system used as part of peer review be openly accessible"
bryanwilder.github.io
Equilibrium effects of LLM reviewing
Equilibrium effects of LLM reviewing
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Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
This is absolutely frightening.
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
Should LLMs be used to review papers? AAAI is piloting LLM-generated reviews this year. I wrote a blog post arguing that using LLMs as reviewers can have bad downstream consequences for science by centralizing judgments about what constitutes good research. bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev...
bryanwilder.github.io
Equilibrium effects of LLM reviewing
Equilibrium effects of LLM reviewing
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Lily Xu @lilyxu.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Paper: Deep RL + mixed integer programming to plan for restless bandits with combinatorial (NP-hard) constraints. with @brwilder.bsky.social, Elias Khalil, @milindtambe-ai.bsky.social Poster #416 on Friday @ 3–5:30pm bsky.app/profile/lily...
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Nikhil Garg @nkgarg.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
Updated abstract deadline is this Thursday, with full paper deadline the following Thursday! Please submit your papers. We will support hybrid presentations for those unable to travel. There is also a non-archival option for those who would like to submit the paper to a journal in the future!
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Nikhil Garg @nkgarg.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
🚨 Call for Papers – #EAAMO25 🚨 We invite researchers, practitioners & policymakers to submit work on equity, access, & fairness in algorithms, optimization & mechanism design. 📅 Abstracts due Apr-17 📅 Papers due April-24 🔗 Learn more: conference.eaamo.org/cfp/
conference.eaamo.org
Call for Participation
The fifth ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO ‘25) will occur November 5–7, 2025 in University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
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Berk Ustun @berkustun.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Couldn't find a machine learning for health starter pack so I made one.  DM/Reply if you want to be added! go.bsky.app/PJKJ8vK
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Bryan Wilder @brwilder.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
Great starting point for algorithmic decision making on bsky!
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