Jess Sorrell

Assistant Prof @ Johns Hopkins CS. Interested in theory of ML, secure computation. All cat pictures are my own and do not represent the cats of my employer.

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

Congrats all!

[Gautam Kamath @thegautamkamath]

Honoured that our 2016 paper, Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability, w/ Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra, Alistair Stewart, was awarded the 2026 Gödel Prize

This is the highest award for papers in theoretical CS. 1/7

[Gillian Hadfield @ghadfield]

Humans don’t follow a values list. We make predictions about how a community will respond to a behavior. That capacity, normative competence, is what we should be building into AI. Talked about it on Ethical Machines.
https://t.co/XUeUKo7CMy

[Csaba Szepesvari @CsabaSzepesvari]

@RLtheory makes a come back, with expanded scope, an awesome lineup of talks! This is going to be fun!

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

Awesome lineup @SimonsInstitute this week! Looking forward to the recordings. https://t.co/a4lmZifbIg

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

@lreyzin @SimonsInstitute Just saw the lineup for talks this week. Looks great!

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

@_onionesque It felt like the right time for an optimism revival!

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

Printing and framing this tweet for my office

[Larissa Schiavo @lfschiavo]

things are gonna get weird. you must get commensurately weird.

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

@littmath @AcerFur Curious what you consider OOD! I've noticed really variable performance in different domains and am trying to back out what work I should prioritize outsourcing. Lots of internal inconsistency around theoretical crypto, e.g., but relatively reliable responses to optimization Qs

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

@aminkarbasi Then you can get proportionately weird

[Dylan Foster 🐢 @canondetortugas]

We have a last-minute internship opening for summer/fall 2026---working with Samy Jelassi, who just joined us! Apply here: https://t.co/SB8Ok9XO3k

[Dravyansh Sharma @DravyanshSharma]

Excited to announce our workshop on "Learning in an Agentic World" at COLT 2026!

We invite submissions for our Call for Abstracts (due June 1, 2026): https://t.co/dqzpUCt7xH

Thanks to my great co-organizers: Hedyeh Beyhaghi, Avrim Blum and @HanShao16!

[Thomas G. Dietterich @tdietterich]

Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

@thegautamkamath @TheSalonML @argymouz @MLFoundations @mshubhankar22 @astar_research @viverson2004 @MITEECS @MLtheory Congrats to the gang!

[Leon Lang @Lang__Leon]

We just released the full course materials of the Iliad Intensive — a month-long, full-time AI alignment course for mathematicians, physicists, and theoretical computer scientists.
~20 contributors, 19 modules, at a depth that doesn't exist elsewhere for most of these topics. 🧵

[Alexander Berger @albrgr]

Nobel laureate Al Roth has a great piece in @washingtonpost today on why we should compensate kidney donors. Kidney failure disproportionately hits Black and low-income Americans, costs Medicare $55B+/yr, and most people who need a transplant will die without one. 🧵

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

The birding slack channel is my favorite DSAI slack channel, don't tell Mark

[Mark Dredze @mdredze]

Apparently, my students have brought binoculars to their office to bird watch during the day. The advantages of our new beautiful @HopkinsDSAI office space. 🦜🦆🕊️

Should I be worried about productivity?

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

@thegautamkamath I think it would be totally reasonable to include it in the call for papers as a discretionary guideline for authors and reviewers to consider. It sets some very reasonable expectations for submissions! I'm less sold on having authors complete and insert a literal checklist

[Nick @nickcammarata]

alignment theory: we need fifty years worth of shard theory progress in five years

alignment practice: lets make sure to tell it no goblins twice so we're absolutely sure there's no goblins

[Jess Sorrell @OptimistsInc]

Alessa is one of the most preternaturally productive, independent, and curious undergrads I've had the pleasure of meeting. If you have the opportunity to work with her, I cannot recommend taking it enough!

[JHU Computer Science @JHUCompSci]

Alessa Carbo’s AI-powered translation of sign language videos earned her first authorship at a major natural language processing conference. Learn about her path to publishing: https://t.co/3R3LmZsZXm

[Samuel Hammond 🦉 @hamandcheese]

Proud to have contributed to this!

https://t.co/wFqFyqCAOP