Ryan J. Gallagher

@ryanjgallag.com

4704 Followers 1052 Following

Applied scientist trying to make the internet a little better. PhD. Trust & safety, networks, fingerstyle guitar. I use my hair to express myself. They/he

AI overview of a google search for "generalized word shift graphs": "Generalized word shift graphs are an interpretable data visualization framework that unmasks exactly which words drive differences between two texts and how they do so. They are incredibly useful for computational text analysis and digital humanities to validate aggregate averages. How they work: Instead of boiling text down to a single number, the graph uses weighted averages to parse out variation. Every word's contribution is calculated as a product of two factors. 1. Frequency: How much the usage of the word has increased or decreased between texts. 2. Score (Measurement): How much the word's assigned value (e.g. sentiment, topic probability, or informativeness) shifts."

My cat Mabel with her paws on my shoulder as I play guitar

Screenshot of the home page for the upcoming Python package "wordlevel"

Code for generating comparisons between text using the new Python package I have been developing. It's 17 lines of code, including loading sample data

Screenshot of a job posting to work on "product safety" at xAI, the company owned by Elon Musk and responsible for Grok

Side eye meme

Where are the annotation plans? What is the eval strategy? Do you even know how you will measure model quality? Who signs off access to external models? Is legal aware of the data you will send?

Most AI leaders are still scared to admit, or simply not aware, that half of the roadmap is boring enabling work. But if you do not surface those items, you trick everyone into thinking that model development is a straight line rather than a sequence of dependencies. Splitting grand goals into meaningful intermediate steps and knowing the right people and dependencies to achieve them is a good chunk of our job. Simplifying it undermines our own credibility and, in the end, does not generate any value.

The abstract of my first paper. "The protest hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial killings of Black Americans"

A "word shift plot" which is a vertical chart with horizontal stacked bars

Draft of a word shift plot, a horizontal stacked bar chart

A draft scientific figure of a word shift plot (a glorified bar chart)

Screenshot of a paper's citations which are in a format that don't include the paper names

Description of the constant potts model (cpm) quality function for the Leiden algorithm, showing how it's equivalent to finding communities of a certain density

Screenshot of a Sage Journals link preview of Bluesky. It's generic and not specific to the paper being shared

Memorial post from senator Chuck Schumer on X

Screenshot of accounts affiliated with PlayStation on X, PlayStation France and Naughty Dog. They have the PlayStation icon next to their names showing they are affiliated with the original PlayStation verified account

Screenshot of US EPA account on X with a grey verification checkmark

Video of me playing fingerstyle guitar

NSF priorities announcement: " Are you still funding research on misinformation/disinformation?
Per the Presidential Action announced January 20, 2025, NSF will not prioritize research proposals that engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen. NSF will not support research with the goal of combating "misinformation," "disinformation," and "malinformation" that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate."

Screenshot of the names of two articles by Ryan J Gallagher. The first is Anchored Correlation Explanation: Topic Modeling with Minimal Domain Knowledge. The second is Reclaiming Stigmatized Narratives: The Networked Disclosure Landscape of #MeToo

Picture of the elephant from the game It Takes Two. Text: "What's my favorite horror movie? Oh idk maybe the one where this sweet baby angel has to suffer because two adult idiots can't just talk it out"

Meme of woman laughing nervously saying what the fuck

Picture of a calico cat

Screenshot of the options when reporting a piece of content. It can be tagged as misleading, spam, unwanted sexual content, anti-social behavior, illegal and urgent, or other

Ah shit here we go again meme

Diagram of the Swiss cheese model of mitigating online information. It shows several layers of Swiss cheese with content passing through them. The content passes through some holes but not others. The layers are labeled media literacy, inoculation, correction, content labeling, content moderation, deplarforming

Meme of "It ain't much but it's honest work"

Screenshot of the categories for which a post can be reported

Screenshot of the tech stack for the Xblock screenshot labeler

A meme of different kinds of generic network science papers

Screenshot of YouTube showing nothing when you turn off personalized recommendations

Tweet from Elon Musk: Worth noting that any attempts to weaponize Community Notes to demonetized people will be immediately obvious because all code and data is open source

Picture of water pouring through an apartment ceiling