Sireesh Gururaja

@siree.sh

2600 Followers 3230 Following

PhD student @ltiatcmu.bsky.social. Working on NLP that centers worker agency. Otherwise: coffee, fly fishing, and keeping peach pits around, for...some reason https://siree.sh

"Yes, the computer did arrive "just in time." But in time for what? In tie to save—and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize—social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them. The computer, them, was used to conserve America's social and political institutions. It buttressed them and immunized them, at least temporarily, against enormous pressures for change."
Quote from Pierce's "Whither Speech Recognition". It reads: "It would be too simple to say that work in speech recognition is carried out simply because one can get money for it. That is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. We are safe in asserting that speech recognition is attractive to money. The attraction is perhaps similar to the attraction of schemes for turning water into gasoline, extracting gold from the sea, curing cancer, or going to the moon. One doesn't attract thoughtlessly given dollars by means of schemes for cutting the cost of soap by 10%. To sell suckers, one uses deceit and offers glamor."
An American alligator named Otis at the Pittsburgh zoo
Facebook report screen with the option "I'm in this photo and I don't like it" selected.
Tweet that reads "I...worked on this story for a year...and...he just...he tweeted it out."
Glowing eyes skull meme with text: "T5"
Screenshot of paper title "Beyond Text: Characterizing Domain Expert Needs in Document Research"
Screenshot of the full paper submission date for the datasets and benchmarks track. The date is described as "Datasets and Benchmarks - Full Paper Submission and Co-author Registration"
Screenshot from the Wikipedia article "Name of Pittsburgh", describing how John Forbes (a Scotsman) may have pronounced Pittsburgh similar to Edinburgh.
Car salesman meme, with salesman advertising how many bolded numbers can fit into a table.
The abstract of a paper titled "Basic Research, Lethal Effects: Military AI Research Funding as Enlistment". In the context of unprecedented U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) budgets, this paper examines the recent history of DoD funding for academic research in algorithmically based warfighting. We draw from a corpus of DoD grant solicitations from 2007 to 2023, focusing on those addressed to researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Considering the implications of DoD funding for academic research, the paper proceeds through three analytic sections. In the first, we offer a critical examination of the distinction between basic and applied research, showing how funding calls framed as basic research nonetheless enlist researchers in a war fighting agenda. In the second, we offer a diachronic analysis of the corpus, showing how a 'one small problem' caveat, in which affirmation of progress in military technologies is qualified by acknowledgement of outstanding problems, becomes justification for additional investments in research. We close with an analysis of DoD aspirations based on a subset of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant solicitations for the use of AI in battlefield applications. Taken together, we argue that grant solicitations work as a vehicle for the mutual enlistment of DoD funding agencies and the academic AI research community in setting research agendas. The trope of basic research in this context offers shelter from significant moral questions that military applications of one's research would raise, by obscuring the connections that implicate researchers in U.S. militarism.
A stream in mid-fall.
Thought clouds depicting questions we've heard about the field: how big a deal is GPT-4, really? Were things always this fast-paced? Why is everything PyTorch/Huggingface?
Line graph showing mentions of software libraries in *CL papers. Libraries show cyclical use, with a "successor" library rising past the previous dominant library shortly after its peak. We see this pattern ith Theano, Tensorflow, Pytorch, and Hugging Face particularly.
A chart showing the number of unique researchers publishing in *CL venues. The number has increased from 715 in 1980, to 17,829 in 2022.
An image depicting typical attitudes during the two phases of research.
A timeline of developments in natural language processing, below a chart showing citations of popular papers and mentions of common methods.
Screenshot of paper title: "To Build Our Future, We Must Know Our Past: Contextualizing Paradigm Shifts in Natural Language Processing"