Connor T. Jerzak

"Counterfactuals. At planetary scale." The Planetary Causal Inference (PCI) book launches soon: planetarycausalinference.org/book-launch/

Some exciting news: The 2027 PolMeth annual conference is taking place at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City! Save the date: July 15-17, 2027 I'll be organizing with my fantastic colleague Yuree Noh. Reach out with questions, and see you there!

1/3 🌟 UH Political Science Job Market Spotlight: Meet Shiladitya Kumar, a Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics, political economy, and methodology. His dissertation examines candidate wealth and electoral competition in India.

We really need to make Meng's Big Data Paradox central to teaching, don't we? Researchers don't know this stuff bc they have never been exposed to it. But it is fundamental. (Link to paper PDF statistics.fas.harvard.edu/sites/g/file...)

We'd like to officially welcome COW's new Graduate Assistant, @soyeonelenakim.bsky.social of @utgovernment.bsky.social.

Omatharv Bharat Vaidya, Ashwin Vinod, Pedram Akbarian, Aditya Sai Ellendula, Connor T. Jerzak, Nhat Ho: ExpertMuon-Compass: Alignment-Guided Step Sizes for Mixture-of-Experts Training https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04140 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.04140 https://arxiv.org/html/2610.04140

We're hiring in American politics for two positions, 1 Assistant Professor and 1 either Assistant or Associate. See link below for details. careers.uh.edu/jobs/assista...

UT Austin Political Methodology Speaker Series presents: Kevin Esterling (UC RIVERSIDE) "Using Digital Twin Simulation for Synchronous Communication Research: With an Application to the Structured Group Design" THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1 12:30 PM BAT 5.108

Princeton's Research Program in Development Economics (RPDE) is hiring 2 Postdoctoral Research Associates. 12-month appointment, summer 2027 start - no teaching responsibilities! Apply now: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Questions? → write to rpde@princeton.edu

Several interesting job openings now at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, including two Quantitative Policy Analysts: one in survey data and one in impact evaluation. recruitment.jrc.ec.europa.eu/vacancies

On the UT Austin Gov Department Committee on AI in Graduate Education this year -- if you would like to send along thoughts re: this topic, you may use this anonymous comments portal: connorjerzak.com/feedback

✨ We’re excited to announce the Fall 2026 IAS Seminar Series, featuring a stellar lineup of speakers and thought-provoking talks. Seminars take place every Thursday and are open to all! #AcademicSky #CSS #socsky #sociology

We’re excited to welcome three outstanding new faculty members to UT Austin's Department of Government! Gianna Englert joins the department this fall, followed by Justin Melnick and Matthew Conklin in Fall 2027. #UTAustin #Government #Faculty #NewFaculty

Florida State University’s political science department is hiring this year at the junior level in American Politics and Comparative Politics. Applicants for both jobs should have strong substantive and quant methods skills but otherwise the fields are open. The postings should be on ejobs soon.

This book is terrific—incredible new data, amazing and heart wrenching stories, and super timely. Highly recommended to those interested in American politics, political behavior, immigration, and law & society (and beyond).

Congratulations to UT Computer Science Ph.D. student Yeonju Ro on being named a 2026 MLCommons ML and Systems Rising Star! Co-advised by Aditya Akella and @atlaswang.bsky.social, Yeonju is also a contributor to UT’s @ldosexpedition.bsky.social and Infra AI Center.

One-day workshop at Chalmers on 5 June: Principled Statistics in the Age of AI (PSAI26). Speakers: Xiao-Li Meng (keynote, Harvard), Joshua Bon, Cory McCartan, Fredrik Johansson, Ashkan Panahi. Free, registration by 29 May → jameshbailie.github.io/PSAI26/

Postdoc opening at Chalmers / AI and Global Development Lab: Data Science & Statistics. Estimating poverty from satellite imagery of African communities; causal inference and prediction-powered inference for policy evaluation. Deadline 27 May 2026. www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...

PhD opening at Chalmers / AI and Global Development Lab: Earth Observation, Data Science, and AI for poverty estimation. Deep learning on Sentinel-2 imagery, benchmarked against Pléiades and Landsat, with AI-explainability. Deadline 13 June 2026. www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...

Omatharv Bharat Vaidya, Connor T. Jerzak, Nhat Ho, Chandrajit Bajaj: Queryable LoRA: Instruction-Regularized Routing Over Shared Low-Rank Update Atoms https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08423 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.08423 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.08423

We’re looking for a managing director for the AI.UP center at the University of Potsdam. AI.UP develops and consults on AI across disciplines and supports interdisciplinary collaboration and grant initiatives. *Permanent position* Deadline: June 28, 2026 Details: causalinferencelab.com/jobs

Samuel G. Balter, Ethan Jerzak, Connor T. Jerzak: Multiplication in Multimodal LLMs: Computation with Text, Image, and Audio Inputs https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18203 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.18203 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.18203

Thanks, Ingo! Graham Goff and I have put a lot of work into this package. {DAGassist} can estimate a wide range of models and classify covariate roles after you make your DAG either with {ggdag} or {daggitty}. We hope that the package can make DAG-consistent estimation a little easier for everyone!

UT Austin PolMeth Speaker Series: Grad Student Lightning Talks this week! ⚡️ 🗓️ Thurs, Apr 16 @ 12:30pm 📍 Batt 5.108 (Lunch provided!) 🗣️ Rachel Jeon: Activism & Treaty Design 🗣️ Sophia Lander: Tech Innovation in PPPs 🗣️ Allison Verrilli: Policing Federalism & Local Safety

We're hiring a Research Support Associate at MIT Political Science. Work with me, In Song Kim, Rich Nielsen, and Naoki Egami on methods and political economy. Great opportunity for those considering a PhD in the social sciences. One-year position with possible extension.

Excited to welcome Gengchen Mai to the UT Austin Methods Speaker Series this Thursday, April 2! Talk: “Spatial Representation Learning: What, How, and Why” on latest GeoAI & scientific applications. 🕛 12:00-1:30pm 📍 BAT 5.108 (5th floor Batts Hall), UT Austin campus Join us!

New grad course at UT Austin this coming Fall (2026); look for this in the catalog -- "Gov 385L: Causal ML & EO for Social Sci"

Cool workshop upcoming this May -- join if you can. "We take rationality seriously, but should we? Why is a rational agent better in some respect than an irrational one? Is rationality just instrumentally useful, or does it have intrinsic value?" ejerzak.github.io

Join us on Thursday, 29 January, at *13:30 CET for the International Roundtable on Computational Social Science with Bedoor AlShebli (NYU Abu Dhabi) 🔹 The Science of Science... and its Human Side 🔹 More info: liu.se/en/event/int...

The remains of Gresham castle photographed with a regular camera and how it looks with a LiDar drone camera.

Calling those looking to get feedback on their quant work📢: Join us at @TexasAM for TexMeth2026 this Feb. Great opportunity to connect with the regional community and showcase your research. The sun will still be strong for those coming from the north!🤝📊☀️ Apply: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The 8th European Conference on Social Networks (EUSN 2026) will take place on 11-15 August 2026 in Norrköping, Sweden, hosted by @iasliu.bsky.social ⌛ Deadline for workshop and session proposals: 1 December 2025 More information: liu.se/en/event/eus...

Looking forward to giving a presentation on the planetary causal inference paradigm at Department of Methodology, LSE, today. Join us if you are around. www.lse.ac.uk/methodology/...

Sign up for this week's Seminar Series with @adeldaoud.bsky.social 💡 21 Nov, 2 - 3pm 🌎Planetary Causal Inference: combining computer vision and earth observation to analyse disparities in health and living conditions among neighbourhoods in Africa, 1990 to date www.eventbrite.com/e/department...

If you are in the vicinity of Oxford University, join me today at 4 pm for my talk at Nuffield College. Title: "Planetary Causal Inference: combining computer vision and earth observation to..." Link to event details: [Sociology Seminar at Nuffield College](www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...)

Markus B. Pettersson, Adel Daoud: Leveraging Compact Satellite Embeddings and Graph Neural Networks for Large-Scale Poverty Mapping https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01408 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01408 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.01408

Excited to see our PhD student Andrés Cruz (@arcruz0) presenting his work "Sensitivity Bounds for Uncertainty Propagation" at LAPolMeth IX in Viña del Mar, Chile. Catch it during the poster session on Nov 22 (12:45-14:00, Building C). Don't miss this work on uncertainty in quant social science!

Debiasing ML predictions for causal inference—no new labels needed. We propose Tweedie’s correction to fix shrinkage enabling “one map, many trials.” arxiv.org/abs/2508.01341 #CausalInference #MachineLearning #EarthObservation #PovertyMapping

🥳 Join us in celebrating @alongcamejones.bsky.social and his legacy with the Policy Agendas Project. Excited to see what @seanmtheriault.bsky.social and Derek Epp do next! 🤟

ML wealth maps from space 🛰️ are great, but suffer from "shrinkage" bias, which waters down policy impact results (causal inference). We developed correction methods that fix this bias *without* new data. arxiv.org/abs/2508.01341 #CausalInference #DataForGood #AI #PovertyMapping #EarthObservation

Are you interested in using earth observation data and deep learning for estimating poverty in Africa, poverty specifically? Then apply to this research engineer position at AI and Global Development Lab. More info about our research at www.aidevlab.org . Deadline is 7th Nov. lnkd.in/ePX7VT-K

New undergrad course (UT Austin, this spring): Gov 355M - AI & Programming Foundations for Computational Social Science. We'll treat curiosity as our raw material and AI+computation as our foundry - learning how the frontiers of technology can accelerate discovery in the social sciences + beyond.