Emma Pierson

Assistant prof @Berkeley_EECS, core faculty @UCJointCPH. Developing ML methods to study health & inequality.

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

Our paper, "What's in My Human Feedback", was selected for an oral at ICLR!

Our method automatically + interpretably identifies preferences in human feedback data; we use this to improve personalization + safety.

Please reach out if you have data/use cases to apply this to!

[Raj Movva @rajivmovva]

🎉 Excited that WIMHF was selected for an oral at ICLR 2026!

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

@jxmnop @brianchristian @CHAI_Berkeley one of my favorite pieces of scientific writing ever!! and thrilled you're coming back @brianchristian!!

[Serina Chang @serinachang5]

User simulators have emerged as promising tools for building interactive AI, but what makes a “good” simulator?

We reframe the problem as what creates downstream value for humans

Our new simulator test: how an LLM assistant trained with the simulator performs with human users🧵

[Shreya Shankar @sh_reya]

I'm joining Carnegie Mellon's CS Department (and HCII by courtesy) as an assistant professor in Fall 2027!

I'll be recruiting PhD students next cycle. If you're interested in AI systems or human-AI collaboration, list me in your application. Stay tuned for more about my new lab!

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

Congratulations to Vatsal, who did terrific work in our lab last summer!

[Vatsal Baherwani @vatsalbaherwani]

I'm honored to receive this year's @NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! As an NSF Fellow, I will work on AI for scientific discovery by developing agents that can propose, test, and verify scientific hypotheses autonomously.

I'm very grateful to my mentors for their guidance and support throughout my research career: @PandaAshwinee and @tomgoldsteincs at UMD, @rajivmovva and @2plus2make5 at Berkeley, and @Pavel_Izmailov and @andrewgwils at NYU.

[Serina Chang @serinachang5]

🎉 Thrilled to have two papers accepted to ACL 2026 main!
1. Graph-based models match LLMs on close-ended human simulation tasks with far less compute & greater transparency
2. (oral) How to allocate human samples towards fine-tuning vs post-hoc rectification in simulation

[Erfan Jahanparast @erfan__jp]

New paper: What Do LLMs Know About Opinions?

If we want LLMs to reflect diverse human views or simulate human responses well, we need to understand what they know about human opinions.

Current evaluations mostly rely on next-token probs, but what if that misses a lot of what the model actually knows? 💡

In our ICLR 2026 paper, we find that models know much more about human opinions than their outputs reveal.

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

Our lab, within the Berkeley EECS department, is hiring a postdoc!

More info and quick application form: https://t.co/GgYiwvtDbH

Apply by May 1!

Please reshare :)

[Michael Haynes 🇻🇦 @MLJHaynes]

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV on Trump’s warning to Iran of “civilization” destruction —

“This is truly not acceptable. Here there are certainly questions of international law, but even more than this a question of morality for the good of people.”

He adds the war is “continuing to escalate and is not resolving anything… is only provoking more hatred throughout the world.”

“attacks on civilian infrastructure are against international law, but it is also against sign of the hatred and division that we are capable of.”

Video @Reuters

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

New paper: "In Your Own Words"! We created a framework to identify themes in free-text survey data and showed its benefits on a new dataset of how people describe their own identities (available for research!) See @jennyshwang's thread below.

[Jenny Wang @jennyshwang]

New paper: "In Your Own Words"! We propose a computational framework for identifying interpretable themes from free-text survey data, and demonstrate its benefits on a new dataset of self-described race, gender, and sexual orientation. 🧵1/

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

This would be a good time for: a.) STRATCOM commanders who implement orders to fire nuclear missiles to read up on Nuremberg and prosecutions for obeying orders to commit war crimes; and b.) for cabinet members to reread the 25th Amendment and have each other on speed dial.

[Seth Lazar @sethlazar]

This is superb. Among other things, I think a great read for anyone starting a PhD or other graduate study with an interest in AI and philosophy.

I particularly agree with this quote (unsurprisingly). I'm hopeful that our new School of Government and Policy in DC will train a good number of top quality practitioners in the kind of philosophy and politics necessary to make powerful AI go well.

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

We have a new piece in Nature Health led by @dmshanmugam, @sidhikab1, and a wonderful team of coauthors on how to move towards a world in which race is not used in clinical algorithms!

[Divya Shanmugam @dmshanmugam]

New in Nature Health: how might we move towards a world in which race is not used in clinical algorithms? We need (1) careful comparison of race-aware and race-neutral algorithms and (2) systemic efforts to address underlying disparities.

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

Congratulations to @gsagostini, whose recent Nature Comms paper releasing a fine-grained migration dataset (https://t.co/ga3unuQ8q0) just won a student paper award at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting!

[Gabriel Agostini @gsagostini]

Had a great time presenting our work on building MIGRATE–a new dataset of US migration–at the @theAAG Annual Meeting today. Happy to also share that we received an AAG student paper award for this work!!!

Come chat if you are at #AAG26 this week.

https://t.co/0o04d8Ep5p

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Horrifying. We need to know exactly how this happened. Again, I do not believe for a second that this was intentional, but a terrible terrible mistake was made. We very much need to know if any policy changes contributed to it.

[Serina Chang @serinachang5]

📢 I'm recruiting a postdoc to start in summer 2026! My lab is part of @Berkeley_EECS, @UCJointCPH & @berkeley_ai. We're looking for candidates in AI & society, with projects on the societal impacts of gen AI (collaborating w/ real-world orgs) and modeling human behavior with AI!

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

@thegreatgustby @OpenAI I did.

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

.@OpenAI is nothing without its people -- many of whom are brilliant, ethical, and able to work anywhere.

Please, guys -- is this empowerment of authoritarians really what you want to be striving towards? Your talents are better-used elsewhere.

[jasmine sun @jasminewsun]

200+ Google and OpenAI staff have signed this petition to share Anthropic's red lines for the Pentagon's use of AI

let's find out if this is a race to the top or the bottom

https://t.co/3qgmaLfM0i

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

@DanielFein7 Whoa very cool!!

[Emma Pierson @2plus2make5]

Our paper, "What's in My Human Feedback", was selected for an oral at ICLR!

Our method automatically + interpretably identifies preferences in human feedback data; we use this to improve personalization + safety.

Please reach out if you have data/use cases to apply this to!

[Raj Movva @rajivmovva]

🎉 Excited that WIMHF was selected for an oral at ICLR 2026!