iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Excited to join Transluce (transluce.org) part-time as a senior research fellow! (I'll remain full-time faculty at Berkeley.)

transluce.org

Transluce

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

New paper in Nature Communications! We show you can map out urban flooding by using vision-language models to detect floods in large-scale street scene datasets. In New York City, our method identifies flooded neighborhoods, home to 100k people, that current methods miss. 1/

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

New piece in The Atlantic! We always hear that AI will cure cancer, and I would immediately benefit if it did. Still, I argue that racing ahead on generalist AI models creates unclear benefits for cancer that are outweighed by broader societal harms. Gift link: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

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Gabriel Agostini @gsagostini.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Excited to see MIGRATE recognized in the IPUMS awards! Huge thanks to @emmapierson.bsky.social, @nkgarg.bsky.social, and our coauthors. Our work primarily aims to make spatiotemporal data more trustworthy and accessible to researchers, just like IPUMS. Read the paper to request data access!

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Marissa Kumar Gerchick @mkgerchick.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

The Tech Team at ACLU is hiring! We are looking for a Data Scientist with expertise in NLP and AI ethics to work on using language tech to support ACLU's mission. Come help us tackle questions about how AI systems can be carefully applied to support the public interest. www.aclu.org/careers/appl...

aclu.org

Careers at ACLU

Join our team! We’re looking for committed, passionate people for open roles at the ACLU.

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Our lab, within the Berkeley EECS department, is hiring a postdoc! More info and quick application form: forms.gle/4CcESe1TGFoo... Apply by May 1! Please reshare :)

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

New paper: "In Your Own Words"! We: - develop a framework to identify themes in free-text survey data - show its benefits on a new dataset of how people self-describe their race, gender, and sexual orientation - release this data for research! See @jennyshwang.bsky.social's thread below :)

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

We have a new piece in Nature Health led by @dmshanmugam.bsky.social, @sidhikabalachandar.bsky.social, and a wonderful team of coauthors on how to move towards a world in which race is not used in clinical algorithms!

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Our paper, "What's in My Human Feedback", received an oral presentation at ICLR! Our method automatically+interpretably identifies preferences in human feedback data; we use this to improve personalization + safety. Reach out if you have data/use cases to apply this to! arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26202

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Cornell Tech @cornelltech.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

New research is offering new insight on how Americans move — all the way to the neighborhood level. A new dataset, MIGRATE, maps annual moves with 4,600‑times more detail than standard public data, revealing patterns hidden in county‑level reporting: bit.ly/49XSD6w

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

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.bsky.social's thread!

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

We have a new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine! Patient race is widely used in medical algorithms...but it's unclear how patients feel about this. We conduct the first nationally-representative YouGov survey to find out, producing four findings with practical clinical implications. 1/

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

We have a new paper in Science Advances proposing a simple test for bias: Is the same person treated differently when their race is perceived differently? Specifically, we study: is the same driver likelier to be searched by police when they are perceived as Hispanic rather than white? 1/

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Divya Shanmugam @dmshanmugam.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

New #NeurIPS2025 paper: how should we evaluate machine learning models without a large, labeled dataset? We introduce Semi-Supervised Model Evaluation (SSME), which uses labeled and unlabeled data to estimate performance! We find SSME is far more accurate than standard methods.

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Erica Chiang @ericachiang.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

selfishly i wish we could keep divya in our lab forever but i guess it would be a disservice to the rest of the world 😅 she’s been such a wonderful mentor to me—i’ve learned a lot from how thoughtful, creative, and knowledgeable she is about everything. she’s also super funny and amazing at baking 🤭

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Meeting Divya 5 years ago was one of the biggest strokes of luck in my faculty career - she is a brilliant scientist who has been foundational to so many of our lab's projects, and any institution would be lucky to hire her.

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

🚨 New postdoc position in our lab at Berkeley EECS! 🚨 (please reshare) We seek applicants with experience in language modeling who are excited about high-impact applications in the health and social sciences! More info in thread 1/3

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Raj Movva @rajmovva.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

📢New POSITION PAPER: Use Sparse Autoencoders to Discover Unknown Concepts, Not to Act on Known Concepts Despite recent results, SAEs aren't dead! They can still be useful to mech interp, and also much more broadly: across FAccT, computational social science, and ML4H. 🧵

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

SF fog coming up to swallow us in time lapse.

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Honored to win a #CHIL2025 best paper award for our work modeling inequality in disease progression, led by @ericachiang.bsky.social! To the NIH: health inequality remains a vital topic to support the health of all Americans. As we prove, failing to account for it biases estimates for everyone.

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molly conger @socialistdogmom.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

assassinations, handcuffing a senator at press conference, marines detaining a civilian, and a military parade for the president’s birthday. rough week for democracy.

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Divya Shanmugam @dmshanmugam.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

and... here is the actual GIF 🙈

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

The first paper of @ericachiang.bsky.social's PhD, just accepted at #CHIL2025, proposes a model of disease progression which estimates and accounts for 3 types of health disparities to more accurately measure disease severity. See her full thread below!

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

The US government recently flagged my scientific grant in its "woke DEI database". Many people have asked me what I will do. My answer today in Nature. We will not be cowed. We will keep using AI to build a fairer, healthier world. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

My ‘woke DEI’ grant has been flagged for scrutiny. Where do I go from here?

My work in making artificial intelligence fair has been noticed by US officials intent on ending ‘class warfare propaganda’.

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

A pleasure to join the Tech Policy Press podcast with @natematias.bsky.social, @geomblog.bsky.social, and @justinhendrix.bsky.social to defend the consensus that AI bias is an important concern.

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Lab had dogathon! Seminal dog discoveries ensued.

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Migration data is critical in the health, environmental, and social sciences. We're releasing a new dataset, MIGRATE: annual flows between 47 billion pairs of US Census areas. MIGRATE is: - 4600x more granular than existing public data - highly correlated with external ground-truth data 1/2

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Raj Movva @rajmovva.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

💡New preprint & Python package: We use sparse autoencoders to generate hypotheses from large text datasets. Our method, HypotheSAEs, produces interpretable text features that predict a target variable, e.g. features in news headlines that predict engagement. 🧵1/

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

We have a new method, HypotheSAEs, for identifying *interpretable text features that predict a target variable* (aka hypothesis generation). What features of a headline predict engagement? What features of a clinical note predict whether a patient will develop cancer? 1/

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Allison Koenecke @allisonkoe.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Humbled and honored to receive this award -- thank you, @sloanfoundation.bsky.social, for supporting STEM research!

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Ashesh Rambachan @asheshrambachan.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Applications are open for the Machine Learning in Economics Summer Institute (MLESI) 2025 are open! If you're a graduate student, come learn about ML/AI and its uses throughout economics. Apply by March 28. The application and more info can be found here: www.chicagobooth.edu/research/cen...

chicagobooth.edu

Machine Learning in Economics Summer Institute 2025 (MLESI25)

<span id="docs-internal-guid-53f97f20-7fff-b55c-c89c-4f85d663a48c" style="color: #39393a;"><span style="color: #000000;">MLESI<span id="docs-internal-guid-394e21c4-7fff-1437-16ff-fdbb1ce1d34c" style="...

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

New piece in Nature: @leahpierson.bsky.social and I argue that philanthropic funders should shield science from cuts the Trump administration may make to climate science, infectious disease, etc. Free access link: rdcu.be/d6aul Longer version on my website: shorturl.at/muwts

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Our article on using LLMs to promote health equity is out in New England Journal of Medicine AI! 85% of equity-related LLM papers focus on *harms*. But also vital are the equity-related *opportunities* LLMs create: detecting bias, extracting structured data, and improving access to health info.

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Oregon stars. Happy holidays to all!

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Some holiday reading if you're looking for an accessible, up-to-date overview of the fast-moving generative AI in medicine literature - our new paper, to appear in Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science!

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Shuvom Sadhuka @shuvoms.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

I'm in Vancouver and will be giving a spotlight talk at #ML4H tomorrow, Dec. 15, at 4:30pm on some ongoing work on modeling multi-stage selection problems in clinical settings. Work done with (high school senior!) Sophia Lin, Bonnie Berger, and @emmapierson.bsky.social. I hope to see you there!

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Stella Li @stellali.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

31% of US adults use generative AI for healthcare 🤯But most AI systems answer questions assertively—even when they don’t have the necessary context. Introducing #MediQ a framework that enables LLMs to recognize uncertainty🤔and ask the right questions❓when info is missing: 🧵

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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Hello...world? Trying to reconstruct my academic networks over here :) Follow me if we know each other or if you're interested in machine learning for healthcare/social equity! Please retweet, or resky, or whatever they call it over here.

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