Stephen Turner

Stephen Turner

@stephenturner.us

Field guide. Quartermaster. Associate Professor and Research Dean at UVA School of Data Science. Views my own. Web: https://datascience.virginia.edu/people/stephen-turner Newsletter: https://blog.stephenturner.us Lab: https://lab.stephenturner.us/

9.4K followers486 following4.3K posts

Stephen Turner reposted

Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

Podcast recs: blog.stephenturner.us/p/podcast-re... Three podcasts, one episode from each. Down to a Science with Kevin Libuit, UVA SDS Data Points at the @uvadatascience.bsky.social with David Danks and Bruce Holsinger, and AI Exchange at UVA with Ryan Wright, Adrienne Ghaly and Tom Williams.

blog.stephenturner.usPodcast Recommendations Oct 2026Down to a Science, UVA SDS Data Points, AI Exchange at UVA. One episode recommendation from each.
Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

...Backed by £100 million of government funding, and up to £200 million in company commitments from OpenAI and Anthropic, it will develop technical capabilities that help the UK better understand, prevent, detect and respond to biological threats"

Stephen Turner reposted

BF Francis Ouellette
@bffo.bsky.social

Replying to @stephenturner.us

Sorry, Stephen, you are not a tool; you are an American tool! 😒 But I still read you and always look forward to the next read! Friends: subscribe to "Paired Ends" 🧬🖥️🧪🔓 #AI #Biosecurity #GreatScience ⬇️ blog.stephenturner.us

blog.stephenturner.usPaired Ends | Stephen D. Turner | SubstackA practicing data scientist's take on AI, genomics, biosecurity, and the ways AI is reshaping how science gets done. Weekly updates from the field. Occasional notes on programming. Click to read Paire...
Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

Apart from running with audiobooks, I realize the only thing I actually liked about wearing my Apple Watch was the ability to tap the Duo push to two-factor auth. Now my uni has disabled that, requiring a separate step on the phone. I think sleep tracking made my sleep worse. Good riddance.

Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

AI Reviews Might Beat Human Peer Reviews doi.org/10.59350/006... A limited demonstration that AI reviews can do the job of human reviewers at improving papers. Deciding what to publish still needs an accountable editor with human reviewers they trust.

doi.orgAI Reviews Might Beat Human Peer ReviewsA limited demonstration that AI reviews can do the job of human reviewers at improving papers. Deciding what to publish still needs an accountable editor with human reviewers they trust.
Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

Winner winner arxiv.org/pdf/2610.27918 "AI disclosure. During the writing of this paper, we had several conversations with Claude, 55, owner of the neighborhood bar in Strasbourg. Unfortunately, none of them was of relevance to the topics of the paper."

Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey had an idea to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement, and other emergency response teams. On Thursday, that idea came out of stealth as Warhound... techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/b...

techcrunch.comWarhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear | TechCrunchWarhound, the brainchild of Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, emerges from stealth to genetically engineer dogs for military and law enforcement.
Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

"The release of large-scale training resources for generative protein design requires careful consideration of potential dual-use biosecurity risks. ... training corpus ... does not include viral proteomes ... Pinal was not trained or intended for viral protein design."

Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

Very good essay. You can read it in 5 minutes. I wrote some of my own thoughts on this over the weekend. What Counts as Impact? doi.org/10.59350/006...

doi.orgWhat Counts as Impact?Bean-counting published papers and impact factors was always a flawed proxy. Generative AI made it much worse.
Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social

Some of my thoughts about the surge in AI-generated papers, why this feels like a completely new kind of problem, and what this means for how we evaluate science in biology. Out now in PLOS Biology: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

journals.plos.orgWhat is biology research for?In the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the assumption that writing a paper requires doing science no longer holds true. Before deciding how to respond to the surge of AI-generated pape...

Stephen Turner reposted

Rob Patro
@robp.bsky.social

I agree with Stephen on the main point here. I think there may even be reasons to go even further, but certainly, as a practical matter, I don't think such disclosures are long for this world. I also think they have some coherence problems from first principles.

Stephen Turner@stephenturner.us

Personal essay, weekend edition: I’m Skeptical of AI Disclosures blog.stephenturner.us/p/ai-disclos...

blog.stephenturner.usI’m Skeptical of AI Disclosures800 words, 3.5 minutes reading time
Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

book people know my feeling when reading: "hard cloth cover, it is printed in full color on Arena Natural Rough, a textured, uncoated paper ... finished with colored endpapers, thread-sewn binding, and a squared spine"

Stephen Turner
@stephenturner.us

typefaces—Mercure, ABC ROM and OCR-X—represent threads of typographic history, with each ... matching a period described in the text... letters printed throughout the book are close cousins of the fonts that the scientists and inventors being described would have read and printed in as they worked.

Stephen Turner reposted

Carl Zimmer
@carlzimmer.com

In July, scientists announced the creation of SpudCell, a synthetic cell with a lot of the hallmarks of life. I recently went to a meeting where they talked about their next steps--including making sure SpudCell doesn't get used for evil. Here's my dispatch. (Gift link) nyti.ms/4yTzTiw

nyti.msThey Created a Cell That’s Almost Alive. What to Do With It Now? (Gift Article)SpudCells may one day produce new medicines and materials. But first scientists have to improve them — and make sure they aren’t misused.

Stephen Turner reposted

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra
@jrossibarra.bsky.social

Today in peak academia: immediately responded to an email in spite of my out of office auto reply. Got an answer several seconds before their out of office auto reply.