#30DayMapChallenge day 9 asked us to get off our screens. @annaloganmc.bsky.social's "analog" map is a hand-painted postcard! 📫

"I chose to paint a postcard of a map of Ann Arbor where I currently live showing the Huron River!" she says

Proposing the Subway-subway (🥪-🚇) index

Great map(s) by @jennahgosciak.bsky.social ---can we count that for 6 days of mapping??---that show both the permanence and the vulnerability of ecological concepts in our urban landscapes!
#30DayMapChallenge

We are slowly catching up to the #30DayMapChallenge!

In our day 3: polygons submission, @zhixuanqi.bsky.social questioned the boundaries and fuzziness of polygons with an animated map that invites us to think about the (not-so-well-defined) idea of neighborhoods.

Another dog map, this is 1 dog = 1 dot. And hopefully 1 day = 1 map for the next 30 days in our working group page 🗺️

N-gram novelty is widely used as a measure of creativity and generalization. But if LLMs produce highly n-gram novel expressions that don’t make sense or sound awkward, should they still be called creative? In a new paper, we investigate how n-gram novelty relates to creativity.

New #NeurIPS2025 paper: how should we evaluate machine learning models without a large, labeled dataset? We introduce Semi-Supervised Model Evaluation (SSME), which uses labeled and unlabeled data to estimate performance! We find SSME is far more accurate than standard methods.

Very happy Divya has been around during my PhD. I might be deep into maps and she might be deep into health (...and so much more!) but I could always count on learning something from her. She's such a kind researcher and great science communicator!

New version of our preprint! More about the project and data access on our website migrate.tech.cornell.edu

Are you a researcher using computational methods to understand cities?

@mfranchi.bsky.social @jennahgosciak.bsky.social and I organize an EAAMO Bridges working group on Urban Data Science and we are looking for new members!

Fill the interest form on our page: urban-data-science-eaamo.github.io

*Proud advisor moment* My (first) PhD student Zhi Liu (zhiliu724.github.io) is 1 of 4 finalists for the INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation Award, the premier dissertation award for the OR community. His dissertation spanned work with 2 NYC govt agencies, on measuring and mitigating operational inequities

"Removing the protected bike lane won’t remove cyclists — it will only make the street less safe," the Department of Transportation said in new testimony.

"The city risks legal liability for knowingly reducing safety on a Vision Zero priority corridor."
buff.ly/QNgRyts

New work 🎉: conformal classifiers return sets of classes for each example, with a probabilistic guarantee the true class is included. But these sets can be too large to be useful.

In our #CVPR2025 paper, we propose a method to make them more compact without sacrificing coverage.

I’m really excited to share the first paper of my PhD, “Learning Disease Progression Models That Capture Health Disparities” (accepted at #CHIL2025)! ✨ 1/

📄: arxiv.org/abs/2412.16406

Can vision-language models understand figurative meaning in multimodal inputs, like visual metaphors, sarcastic captions or memes? Come find out at our #NAACL2025 poster on Friday at 9am!

New task & dataset of images and captions with figurative phenomena like metaphor, idiom, sarcasm, and humor.

I became a dog scientist on April 1st. Now back to normal (a cat scientist).

Migration data lets us study responses to environmental disasters, social change patterns, policy impacts, etc. But public data is too coarse, obscuring these important phenomena!

We build MIGRATE: a dataset of yearly flows between 47 billion pairs of US Census Block Groups. 1/5

💡New preprint & Python package: We use sparse autoencoders to generate hypotheses from large text datasets.

Our method, HypotheSAEs, produces interpretable text features that predict a target variable, e.g. features in news headlines that predict engagement. 🧵1/