Jeff Forbes

Computer Science for all!

[Andrew Barber 🔰🌐 @abarber1]

0/6 is actually hard to do. He’s like a Bizarro World @NateSilver538.

[Kevin Patrick Murphy @sirbayes]

As William Gibson said, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed". I like the funnel metaphor since it also hints at the friction involved with these capababilities diffusing more widely/quickly (despite SV rhetoric).

[Ronnie Chatterji @RonnieChatterji]

How does ChatGPT change the work students produce? And where does critical thinking fit in?

As a professor and father of three, these questions are especially important to me. 🧵

https://t.co/G1gARsxm6j

[U.S. National Science Foundation @NSF]

The FY 2027 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program competition is now open. Learn more and apply: https://t.co/b4EwAFJmRT

📷: Charlotte Geary/NSF

[Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) @BrendanNyhan]

Friends don't let friends continue to give exams and papers that are not adapted to the current AI landscape (this is AFTER 27 bailed so the reality is even worse)

PS Props to students 1, 22, and 31

[Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) @BrendanNyhan]

I asked a (brilliant female) colleague about the apparent gender gap in AI uptake in our field and she suggested that it was driven by women being more likely to be judged as incompetent if they use AI. This resume study suggests, sadly, that she may be correct.

[Ronnie Chatterji @RonnieChatterji]

We're launching the OpenAI Economic Research Exchange: a new program for external researchers conducting independent research on the economic impacts of AI.

We are looking for rigorous empirical projects on questions that matter for workers, firms, institutions, and the broader economy.

https://t.co/NRjJtlS7eD

[M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray]

For 45 years, Berkeley built virtually no new housing. By the mid-2010s, it was the most expensive college town in America. Shortly thereafter, YIMBYs took over and kicked off a building boom. Today, nominal rents are below 2018 rates—remarkable progress on affordability.

[Nathan Lambert @natolambert]

Pretty wild I got my PhD 4 years ago to the day. I feel very lucky that I got to do it and make my switch into AI.

Lot's of people today in AI are underselling the value of going through the process of a PhD.

[Jelani Nelson @minilek]

Many folks seem to be confused, and think the collapse of the CS major graduation numbers at Berkeley could be linked to the "AI is taking SWE jobs" hysteria narrative. Here's the easiest way to see that this is false: the timeline doesn't fit.

The graduating class in 2027 (first small CS cohort graduating) has students who arrived on campus as freshmen in Fall 2023, with freshman admission targets set (i.e. shrunk) by the university in Fall 2022. So, the hysteria narrative obviously doesn't match the timeline; ChatGPT didn't even come out until November 2022.

Now consider the plot below; orange curve is what % of bachelor's degrees are CS degrees each year at Berkeley, and blue curve is what % of applicants applied to be a part of that graduating year, intending to be a CS major in their application (combining both junior transfer and freshman applicants). In other words:

* orange measures CS graduate production
* blue measures CS demand (via % of all applications to the university)

What do you notice? The collapse in orange (CS grads) isn't because of a collapse in blue (demand). In fact it's the opposite: orange collapsed at a time when blue was going up. 1/

[Tiffani Ashley Bell @tiffani]

One of the cruelest changes here is changing benefit time limits for families with kids. Only families with kids 14 and under are exempt—used to be 18

Underlying expectation there is for the 15+ kids to work to eat

Disgusting

[John B. Holbein @JohnHolbein1]

Women are chronically underrepresented in tech/programming sectors.

This new preprint examines whether hiring bias--especially in interviews--is to blame and, if so, why.

Using 60,000+ coding interviews from a peer-to-peer interview platform, it finds that even when women perform similarly to men, they are penalized in interviews.

But which theory of bias actually explains this gap?

The authors test four hypotheses about the source of gender bias in technical hiring.

Hypothesis 1: Ability differences.
Explanation: If women receive lower interview scores because they perform worse, evaluation gaps should mirror performance gaps.
Finding: Rejected. Performance differences on objective coding tasks are small and cannot explain the much larger evaluation penalties women receive.

Hypothesis 2: Statistical discrimination / lack of information.
Explanation: If interviewers underestimate women’s ability, giving them objective performance signals should reduce the gap.
Finding: Rejected. Providing interviewers with automated coding test scores does not reduce the gender gap.

Hypothesis 3: Taste-based discrimination.
Explanation: Interviewers may simply prefer men.
Finding: Not supported. The gap disappears when evaluations are blinded and non-interactive.

Hypothesis 4: Interaction-based bias.
Explanation: Bias arises during live interpersonal interaction (voice, confidence norms, expectations).
Finding: Supported. Gender gaps appear only in interactive interviews, not when the same code is evaluated blindly.

Bottom line: Interviews don’t just measure ability. They produce bias through interaction itself. Reducing gender gaps may require redesigning interviews, not just debiasing interviewers.

[Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD DSc(hon) @PeterHotez]

In the 1970s-80s measles was the single leading killer of children, 2-3 million died annually. Through EPI @WHO we brought it down to 450,000 kids who died annually by 2000. Through @gavi it came down to <100,000. Now the ignorant careless chuckleheads want to erase all our gains

[Kumar Garg @KumarAGarg]

Huge kudos to @NSF on this effort.

[Caleb Watney @calebwatney]

NSF is launching one of the most ambitious experiments in federal science funding in 75 years.

The program is called Tech Labs, and the goal is to invest ~$1 billion to seed new institutions of science and technology for the 21st century.

Instead of funding projects, the NSF will fund teams. I’m in the @WSJ today with a piece on why this matters (gift link): https://t.co/xteQ3NgWVC

Here’s the basic case:

1) Most federal science funding takes the form of small, incremental, project-based grants to individual scientists at universities.

2) The typical NSF grant is ~$250k/year to a professor with a couple of grad students and modest equipment over a few years. This is a perfectly reasonable way to fund some science, but it's not the only way.

3) A healthy portfolio needs more than one instrument. Project-based grants are like bonds: low-risk, steady, safe. But no one trying to maximize long-run returns would put 70% of their portfolio in bonds.

4) Yet that's basically what our civilian science funding portfolio looks like. Around 3/4ths of NSF and NIH grant funding is project-based.

5) Tech Labs is NSF's attempt to diversify that portfolio. The Tech Labs program is aiming for:

- $10-50 million/year awards per team

- 5+ year commitments

- Measuring impact through advancement up the Tech Readiness Level scale rather than papers published

- Up to ~$1 billion for the program

- Supporting research orgs outside traditional university structures

6) Scientific production looks very different than it did when the NSF launched 75 years ago. The lone genius at the chalkboard can only do so much. Frontier science + tech today is increasingly team-based, interdisciplinary, and infrastructure-intensive.

7) The team behind AlphaFold just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It came from DeepMind, an AI lab with sustained institutional funding and full-time research teams. It would be near-impossible to fund this kind of work on a 3-year academic grant.

8) Same pattern at the @arcinstitute (8-year appointments, cross-cutting technical support teams) and @HHMIJanelia (massive infrastructure investments to map the complete fly brain). Ambitious science increasingly needs core institutional support, not a series of project grants stapled together.

9) Similarly, Focused Research Organizations (@Convergent_FROs) have showcased a new model supporting teams with concrete missions and predefined milestones to unlock new funding.

10) There’s a whole ecosystem of philanthropically-supported centers doing amazing research, like the Institute for Protein Design, the Allen Institute, the Flatiron Institute, the Whitehead Institute, the Wyss Institute, the Broad — the list goes on.

11) But philanthropy can’t reshape American science alone. The federal government spends close to $200 billion each year on research and development, an order of magnitude more than even the largest foundations.

12) If we want to change how science gets done at scale, federal funding has to evolve. And the NSF and NIH don’t have dedicated funding mechanisms to support or seed these sorts of organizations.

13) Earlier this year, I started working on a related framework called “X-Labs” that built on all this exciting institutional experimentation that’s been happening within the private and philanthropic sectors. It’s time for the federal government to step into the arena: https://t.co/0iVLobqQeA

14) Traditional university grants are still important for training the next generation of scientists and for certain kinds of curiosity-driven work. But after 75 years of putting nearly everything into one model, we should try something different.

15) And key program details are still being developed! You can reply to the Request for Information with suggestions or feedback on how to design this program here: https://t.co/R6MNo0ZfN1

16) Science is supposed to be about experimentation. Science funding should be too.

[Boaz Barak @boazbaraktcs]

Bill Gates famously said "People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten."

This holds for AI, but with both quantities divided by 4.

[AERA @AERA_EdResearch]

Today's the day! Tonight at 6 pm ET, join us for the livestream of the 2025 #AERABrownLecture, featuring James A. Banks with a discussion forum to follow. https://t.co/OQpxLNHrUO

[AERA @AERA_EdResearch]

"There has always been—and there remains—a wide gap between America’s democratic ideals and its practices." James A. Banks, 2025 #AERABrownLecture

[Robert II Welch @WelchRobII]

Life is just more complex than “there’s a cabal behind everything” and “the establishment decides” and that’s more frightening for people to deal with because it involves looking in the mirror and looking at your friends and neighbors.

[Kapor Center @KaporCenter]

From teaching to Director of CS Equity Initiatives at the #KaporFoundation, Shana V. White has always centered equity in education and building community in classrooms.

Tune into her @RoadtripNation feature to see how she’s shaping a more inclusive CS future for K12 students. Learn more about Shana and her work here: https://t.co/NZD0fpqhBm