A huge relief for international students; I am really happy for them as I know very well the stress that they have been living under #AcademicTwitter

(1/4) Announcing the release of "Spoken Language Interaction with Robots: Research Issues and Recommendations", a report of research recommendations across speech, robotics, dialog, and #NLProc. Joint work with Carol Espy-Wilson, Nigel Ward, and the 26 U.S. National Science Foundation workshop participants.

Queer people are severely underrepresented in robotics. Excited to be organizing this event at Conference on Robot Learning to start building community! Looking forward to hearing from our amazing speakers!

I keep finding out that, despite deep familiarity with the problems in my field, I'm still capable of disappointment. Google forcing out the incomparable @timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) is so unacceptable and so predictable. Yet somehow, despite evidence, I expected better.

What can we do? I'm teaching ML this semester. Our remaining class will consist entirely of algorithmic fairness and ethics in AI, with @timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) (and Jeff Dean) as a driving case study. Education has power too--use it. #IStandWithTimnit #BelieveBlackWomen

Congratulations to Edward Raff and Charles Nicholas for this well-deserved award!

Thank you, Allen School . With a few exceptions, I found the department to be a welcoming, inclusive place, and I am very glad that this is a legitimate disavowal rather than a Google-style "expression of concern." Pedro Domingos Prof. Anima Anandkumar

"The shocking scene was met with less police force than many of the Black Lives Matter protests that rolled across the country ... last year." cnn.com/2021/01/06/pol…

"The DoD had earlier received a request from the US Capitol Police for additional DC National Guard forces but a decision has not been made ... federal police attacked peaceful protesters in outside the White House over the summer" cnn.com/2021/01/06/pol…

For those who are wondering why so much attention has been focused on the response of the Capitol Police to the Trump-inspired riots, here’s a data-driven article that provides some useful frame of reference. fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-p…

I discovered recently that some gmail filters that had been working fine, stopped working fine. They have in fact have been hiding messages, which is rather the precise opposite of fine. I don't know what they "improved" exactly, but if you rely on filters, check them. 😠

Buried in the recent trillion parameter language model paper is how the dataset to train it was created. Any page that contained one of these words was excluded: github.com/LDNOOBW/List-o… Two sample banned words: "twink" and "sex"

Every time I get a rejection because "Oh, this isn't robotics, it's got all this language stuff," I realize I'm surprised because I thought we were past that. The triumph of hope over experience is a wondrous thing.

Style tips. 1: Unless you are actually on a first-name basis, "Harris" > "Kamala" (unless you consistently use Donald, Mike and Joe). 2: to include a discussion of wardrobe choices in a news article, the correct way to handle it is: maybe don't.

OK just to be clear: if I say "we must crack down on serial killers" and you say "why are you launching this thinly veiled personal attack on me" I'm gonna have questions

New NSF fellowship for domestic graduate students from diverse backgrounds!

Our #ICRA2021 paper notification came with a sheet of blank reviews (but wasn't desk rejected). No reviewer content at all. Did this happen to anyone else? PaperPlaza error?

UMBC's Carnegie Classification is now R1, the highest category: doctoral universities with very high research activity, aka Research 1. #UMBC is ranked as one of only 146 R1 U.S. institutions, including 107 public & 39 private universities. #R1 #research news.umbc.edu/umbc-ascends-t…