Nic Weber

Nic Weber

@nmw.bsky.social

Associate Professor @ UW Computational Social Science

507 followers629 following66 posts

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

Strong disagree -this paper is good and I think the extremely talented PhD student that authored it should be proud - she has a bright future ahead of her in science. Pulling ML into a more rigorous paradigm of annotation is what we need much more of - this paper helps that cause.

Laura K. Nelson@lauraknelson.bsky.social

Treading lightly because I'm happy to see data annotation discussions happening anywhere. But I'm also incredibly frustrated that the AI/ML world seems to be happy ignoring literal *decades* of work on this topic. From a recently published paper in AAAI/ACM that has tipped me over into despair fr

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

this is very good - DiD design shows that introduction of accessibility features (enhanced by AI) improves exp. for a class of workers that were previously penalized by platform metrics - allowing for higher earnings, longer tenure, and improved cust ratings (which equates to > job satisfaction)

NBER@nber.org

Examining the relative performance of deaf or hard of hearing workers on one of China’s largest food-delivery platforms, from Yanyou Chen, Mitchell Hoffman, Huilan Xu, and Zhe Yuan www.nber.org/papers/w35372

Nic Weber reposted

ICSSI
@icssi.org

Students are critical to a vibrant ICSSI community. Today, thanks to support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the NSF, we're thrilled to announce: FREE ICSSI 2026 registration for ALL trainees! Registration reopened: icssi.org/register/ Already registered? Look for a refund soon!

Nic Weber reposted

Adam Visokay
@avisokay.bsky.social

Excited to announce that Tyler McCormick and I are organizing a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at the University of Washington, with a focus on AI and social science research. July 6-17 We encourage applications from PhD students, postdocs, and junior faculty: sicss.io/2026/uw/

Nic Weber reposted

Molly Roberts
@mollyroberts.bsky.social

Replying to @mollyroberts.bsky.social

Judge Lin says it's not like Anthropic can secretly update the software without DoD's consent. DOJ says there's an audit underway to better understand what may be in the platform. Essentially no one seems to get how AI works.

Nic Weber reposted

Katelyn Mei
@katelynxmei.bsky.social

🚨🎉Excited to announce that our paper “Grok in the Wild: Characterizing the Roles and Uses of Large Language Models on Social Media” is accepted at @icwsm.bsky.social 2026! In this paper, we investigate how, when, and to what effect Grok is used on X.

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

Give @yang3kc.bsky.social the best reviewer award now!

Kevin Yang@yang3kc.bsky.social

If you are reviewing for IC2S2 and it gives you a headache from reading all 700+ paper titles/abstracts while bidding, I just built a tool for it. It uses an LLM to score how relevant each paper is to your research interests (you can define a list of keywords). 1/2

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

We're working on building a larger corpus of paper and software repository pairs, linking funding to repos, and a suite of metrics related to software quality, sustainability etc.

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

If you want to collaborate on anything above get in touch. Also, please use our models and data. There are lots of open questions about software in science, and we need more rigorous empirical work to answer them ✌️

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

There are many potential confounders for this negative relationship. We hope this finding encourages more work on career trajectories and software contributions.

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

There is a small but significant citation advantage for each additional author who contributes code to a paper. Put another way, papers with more authors contributing to software tend to accumulate more citations (This is not a causal claim and there are potential confounders)

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

Our most depressing result ... We find, paradoxically, that there is a significant *negative* relationship between frequency of code contribution and an individual’s h-index That is, for an individual scientist the more they contribute to software development the smaller their h-index

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

In short, we wanted to study collaboration and the allocation of credit (at both group and invidual levels) in research that produces software... To do that we have to connect papers to repositories, and authors to their developer accounts (more details in our paper on how we did this at scale)

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

Some findings we think are interesting: - >25% of papers have code contributors that are not authors (this is stable across time and field) - On average papers that produce software have just one code contributor - 70% of all 1st authors contribute code (only ~29% for corresponding authors)

Nic Weber reposted

ICSSI
@icssi.org

The International Conference on the Science of Science & Innovation #ICSSI2026 will be in beautiful Boulder, CO, USA! ☀️ June 29 - July 1 ☀️ & Open Data Hackathon, June 28 🧑‍💻 We welcome submissions on all topics in the science of science and innovation, broadly defined. Learn more at 👉 icssi.org 👈

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

This is good - adopting LLMs to write consumer complaints results in better relief.

Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com

The adoption and efficacy of large language models in US consumer financial complaints.

dlvr.itThe adoption and efficacy of large language models in US consumer financial complaints - Nature Human BehaviourUsing a large-scale dataset of US consumer finance complaints, this study shows that LLM-era AI writing assistance surged and causally increased consumers’ chances of relief, improving textual quality such as clarity and benefiting those least likely to succeed.

Nic Weber reposted

Rodrigo Dorantes Gilardi
@rodgdor.bsky.social

I am really excited to co-organize this year's Science of Science Satellite of NetSci 2026 in Boston. Submissions are very open and can include work in progress, work under review, or accepted publications. Please consider submitting before March 18th! Website: netscisci.github.io

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

Extremely impressive answer by Opus - the strategy all Weber games is actually obfuscation

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social

Me: Claude 4.5 Opus, I need a strategy game based on the work of Weber Claude: Here's one based on David Weber's space operas Me: Not that Weber C: Here's a game based on sociologist Max Weber Me: Not that one C: The operas of Carl Maria von Weber? Me: No C: Here is one using Weber grills!

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

This is was essentially Tom Griffiths' keynote this morning at COLM

Shahab Bakhtiari@shahabbakht.bsky.social

Regardless of what explainability/mech interp in AI is actually after, and whether or not they know what they’re searching for, we can confidently say they’re pursuing what systems neuroscience has pursued for decades, with very similar puzzles and confusions.

Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social

'Examining the effects of birth order on personality' in PNAS -> across multiple controls in three countries (UK, Germany, USA) "...we conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

pnas.orgPNASProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...