Aaron Steven White

@aaronstevenwhite.io

2303 Followers 769 Following

computational semanticist. into modular synths and rum. https://aaronstevenwhite.io

Left to right: Ed Lalor (Jin’s primary advisor), Jin Dou, Aaron White (Jin’s co-advisor).
An interface for annotating an app.graycard.* scene graph demonstrated using a picture of a fire inside a fire pit.
A screenshot of the Hypo app showing the gear setup page. The page has tabs for cameras, lenses, filters, film, shoots, darkroom, scanning, and workflows. The cameras tab is selected and is filled by two Nikon F2 entries.
Close up of Japanese maple leaves with water droplets on them in black and white.
Danielle Novak, Alon Hafri, Abhinav Patil, Emma Wing, Pasha Koval, Kyle Rawlins, Julian Grove, Jenny Culbertson, Lilia Rissman, Aaron Steven White, and Woo Jin Choi in front of Love City Brewery in Philadelphia.
Low angle view of the Populus Hotel, its white facade covered in repeating eyelid shaped window pods rising into a partly cloudy sky.
A Co-Motion triple tandem in cream resting against a wood garage door.
Aaron White at CVPR in front of a 3’ x 8’ banner for FOVEA.
A close-up of pink hydrangeas.
The top of Kodak Tower in Rochester, NY against a mostly clear sky.
An orange fixed gear bike with white Velocity Chukker deep-v rims.
A 4×10 grid of 40 small scatterplots, one for each of 40 English verbs. Each facet plots one point for each sentence headed by the corresponding verb in a 2D space whose horizontal axis is "telicity" (how probable it is that the event described by the sentence has a natural endpoint) and vertical axis is "durativity" (how probabile it is that the event described by the sentence is extended in time). The top two rows show 20 manner verbs (e.g. bump, consider, debate, fight, hit, investigate, jab, kick, pour, pull, push, scrub, shake, shoot, smear, stab, wash, wipe) with pink/salmon points and shaded convex-hull regions; the bottom two rows show 20 result verbs (e.g. break, chip, clean, clear, close, combine, conclude, cover, decide, destroy, discover, empty, fill, fold, kill, murder, open, prove, shatter, split) in light blue. For each verb, the shaded hull traces the region of telicity/durativity space its sentences occupy. Some verbs have small tight hulls (their sentences cluster in one part of the space: e.g. bump, prove); others have large diffuse hulls (their sentences span very different regions: e.g. kill, destroy, break, fill).
The neume TUI showing lens and phrase atom definitions in the neume DSL.
A Carver Tyler 777 with C7 trucks leaning against a tree.
A magnolia tree in bloom with a pine behind it.
Loaded Omakase deck with Yow Meraki trucks and Orangatang 4President wheels against a wood garage door.
A draft tui/repl for quivers showing :info and :type calls on a loaded encoder-decoder program.
The cover of a vinyl copy of John Talabot’s Fin in front of a record player on a would stand.
Chorus of "The Dream of the 90s" from Portlandia.
An email from the NSF titled "Vacancies Coming Soon".
A black Audio-Technica record player with Spiral by Vangelis below it.
A spherical tiki mug from Ventiki in Ventura, CA with mint coming out the top. A Bauhaus poster is in the blurred background.
An Ableton 12 window showing midi tracks for pads, stabs, arps, and leads.
A chalkboard walking through deductive parsing for MCFGs.
An example of the panproto class macro.
An excerpt: “On my fifteenth birthday my mother said she'd give me $5. I told her I would rather make a long-distance phone call. I figured Mr. Varèse lived in New York because the record was made in New York (and because he was so weird, he would live in Greenwich Village). I got New York Information, and sure enough, he was in the phone book. His wife answered. She was very nice and told me he was in Europe and to call back in a few weeks. I did. I don't remember what I said to him exactly, but it was something like: "I really dig your music." He told me he was working on a new piece called Déserts. This thrilled me quite a bit since I was living in Lancaster, California then. When you're fifteen and living in the Mojave Desert and find out that the world's greatest composer, somewhere in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory, is working on a song about your "home town" you can get pretty excited. It seemed a great tragedy that nobody in Palmdale or Rosamond would care if they ever heard it. I still think Déserts is about Lancaster, even if the liner notes on the Columbia LP say it's something more philosophical.”
A bottle of still strength Alambique de Cobre by Alambique Serrano.
Two bottles in the Rums of Mexico series.
The header of "Principles and Implementation of Deductive Parsing" by Shieber, Schabes, and Pereira.
Posters for talks at the University of Rochester by Eleanore Neufeld (UMass, Amherst) and Aniello de Santo (University of Utah).
A screenshot from MotionRec showing the 1-bit aesthetic.
A green tiki mug with mint and a metal straw coming out of the top and a Bauhaus poster in the blurred background.
An interface for designing dependent optics in panproto.
A combinatory categorial grammar with custom rules in the probabilistic programming language.
A hidden markov model defined in the probabilistic programming language.
A transformer stated in the probabilistic programming language.
Graphs from Pew Research showing that the Iraq war had surprisingly large support even in 2018, especially among Republicans.
The citations tab for an eprint on Chive showing automatically extracted citations.
The album cover of Oneohtrix Point Never's Tranquilizer.
A mug from Ventiki in Ventura, CA with a sprig of mint and a straw poking out.
He bears the name of his third-generation great-grandfather, Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, as did his father and grandfather before him.
A screenshot of https://www.githubstatus.com/ showing that the only services down is the git services.
The header for a problem set on Bayesian Model Comparison for a course on Statistical Methods in Linguistics.
The album cover of Surgeon’s Force+Form.
A picture of square waves filtered by a low pass filter with high resonance.
Towards Robust Language Technologies for Everyone Antonios Anastasopoulos George Mason University Tuesday, November 11, 2025 12:30 p.m.–2 p.m. Humanities Center, Conference Room D Language technologies, despite all the incredible recent progress, do not yet robustly work for everyone. In this talk I will first summarize some of my group's recent work on addressing challenges we are still facing in the real world, such as handling language varieties (dialects), minority languages from bilingual communities, and catering to the needs of indigenous and endangered language communities. I will discuss solutions around data curation, modeling, and models' cultural adaptation, as well as some exciting preliminary results on incorporating human knowledge into LLMs in a way that reduces data requirements. Antonios (Antonis) Anastasopoulos is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at George Mason University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Notre Dame and then completed a postdoc at Languages Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is on natural language processing with a focus on low-resource settings, endangered languages, and cross-lingual learning, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation (including by a CAREER award), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DoD, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft Research.
A generation from GPT-1 with the seed text: “Our ultimate strength does not come from equipment,” he said. “ GPT-1 continues: we have no such power because we have no mind . i know what it means , she said . the two of them spoke in the same language in which they had spoken only minutes before . the two of them spoke at the same time . they spoke in one language with different accents , and spoke with the same accents at the same time .
“Our ultimate strength does not come from equipment,” he said. “It comes from the men and women of the rank and file. That’s true. It comes from you people, incredible people, good-looking people. Too many good-looking people. I don’t like good-looking people. I never liked good-looking people. I’ll be honest with you, never admitted that before.”
A screenshot of the Wikipedia page for Neal Stephenson's Anathem, with the plot summary: "Anathem is set on the fictional planet of Arbre. Thousands of years before the events in the novel, the planet's intellectuals entered concents (monastic communities) to protect their activities from the collapse of society. The avout (intellectuals separated from Sæcular society) are banned from possessing or operating most advanced technology and are supervised by the Inquisition, which answers to the outside world. The avout are normally allowed to communicate with people outside the walls of the concent only once every year, decade, century, or millennium, depending on the particular vows they have taken."
Executive Decline v. Vocab Growth: In Aging, Who Wins? Jamie Reilly (Temple University) Aging is associated with a paradoxical combination of vocabulary growth and declining executive functions. It is unclear how the interaction between vocabulary knowledge and reduced processing manifests in a naturalistic language task such as conversation. We analyzed >1500 unscripted conversations (>8 million words) between speakers of different ages (18-66) using a newly developed software application, ConversationAlign. We specifically focused on concrete versus abstract word retrieval and lexical alignment as functions of age differences between conversation partners. Aging was robustly associated with abstract word dropout, and age differences between interlocutors were associated with growing misalignment on word concreteness. We will discuss how these observed patterns inform our understanding of patterns of age-based lexical retrieval during naturalistic communication.
A movie poster in French for Last Year at Marienbad.
Surgery on LLMs: Editing, Unlearning, and Securing Knowledge Wengpeng Yin Pennsylvania State University LLMs are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes settings, from scientific discovery to legal assistance to personal health, where we can no longer treat them as static black boxes. We need ways to update, correct, and safeguard their knowledge as the world changes and as privacy risks grow. This talk will present a vision for LLM surgery: systematic ways to make models learn, forget, and protect in a controlled manner. We will explore how to edit models so they gain new knowledge without losing old capabilities, how to make them forget harmful or outdated information without collapsing, and how to truly safeguard private data rather than relying on superficial protections. Along the way, I will share surprising failure cases, new evaluation tools, and early solutions that point toward a future where LLMs can safely and reliably evolve with human needs.
The sleeve of Cate Le Bon’s Michelangelo Dying on top of a record player with a pink record playing.
A Google AI overview: The question "where was Kris by Bergman filmed?" is ambiguous because there are two famous individuals with that name, and the word "kris" can refer to a Swedish word or a type of sword. If you're referring to the 1946 film Crisis (Kris), it was filmed in Hedemora, Dalarnas län, Sweden. If you mean the 2021 film Bergman Island, which features Ingmar Bergman and was filmed on his home island, it was shot on Fårö, Sweden.
GENERIC PROPOSITIONS: WHAT ROLE DO THEY PLAY IN GLIDING ACTION BERNHARD NICKEL Generic generalizations such as "ravens are black" or "tigers have stripes" have seen an upsurge of interest, due in significant part to the fact that they are also the language of stereotypes ("Germans lack a sense of humor"). This interest is presumably motivated by the thought that generics guide actions. In this talk, I investigate this link more closely. The basic problem is that generics display incidence variability: the truth of a given generic is compatible with an incredibly wide range of frequencies with which the predicated property is present among members of the kind. Yet the most widely accepted model of rational action that takes risk into account is expected utility theory where such frequency information is crucial. I'll look at various solutions and present my own, according to which the truth of a generic proposition is only distally related to any particular instance of action guidance.
A zombie glass filled with a cocktail sitting in grass with trees in the background.
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER CENTER FOR LANGUAGE SCIENCES LANGUAGE SCIENCE LECTURE SERIES FALL 2025 9/23 BERNHARD NICKEL HARVARD U 9/30 WENGPENG YIN PENN STATE U 10/07 JAMIE REILLY TEMPLE U 11/11 ANTONIOS ANASTASOPOULOS GEORGE MASON U 11/18 MAYA ABTAHIAN U OF ROCHESTER
The vinyl sleeve of Water from your Eyes’
The vinyl sleeve of No Joy’s Wait to Pleasure laying on top of the dust cover of a spinning record player.
Tracklist Cybotron - Earth Little Computer People - Little Computer People (Karl Bartos Remix) Mobile Space Unit - Penalty Dream Klangwerk - Die Kybernauten Scope - The Future (Cybotron Mix) Calagad 13 - Super Jam (Xtndd) Novamen - Bubblegum Middle Men - Defeat The Object Interfunk - Travel To Another Dimension Excel - Don't Stop Now Chaos - Afrogermanic T.Linder - Wolfpack T.Linder feat. Blak Tony - Leatherneck The Martian - Skypainter The Shadow - The Vision 6K - Exponential Hazed - Bellchant Joey Beltram - Orion Sebastian S., Jessie Deep! - Escape Lory D - Sickness Underground Resistance - Riot Oligo - Light Orbit The AM - Sex Worker uNN - Make Me Listen (Electro) EDO8 - Voyager Insync vs Mysteron2 - Science Fact Scan X - Higher