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Emma Pierson

@emmapierson.bsky.social
2K followers 210 following 52 posts

Assistant professor of CS at UC Berkeley, core faculty in Computational Precision Health. Developing ML methods to study health and inequality. "On the whole, though, I take the side of amazement." people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~emmapiers…

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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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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
My piece is not "pro-cancer". I have a very high risk of cancer, and have watched family members die of it. The piece argues that pushing AI forward at this speed creates unclear benefits for cancer that are outweighed by broader societal harms. Gift link - www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
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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 · 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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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
Finding #3: Respondents were more comfortable with the use of race than with widely-proposed alternatives like zipcode or income. Said one respondent: "What does my paycheck have to do with a genetic mutation?" Don't assume switching to these factors will automatically improve trust.
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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Finding #1: Most respondents were comfortable with the use of race in at least some circumstances. This highlights a gap between calls to eliminate uses of race in medicine and public opinion.
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Emma Pierson @emmapierson.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
See the paper for many robustness checks and discussion of nuances! Our finding persists when using alternate outcomes, statistical models, subsets of the data, and controls satisfying the criteria above. 5/
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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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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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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 · 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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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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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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