Sofia Gil-Clavel
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sof14g1l.bsky.social
Sofia Gil-Clavel
@sof14g1l.bsky.social
620 followers 540 following 280 posts
Researcher, Research Engineer, and Lab Manager at the @societal-analytics.nl, @vuamsterdam.bsky.social | Former @sc3team.bsky.social, @mpidr.bsky.social & @unigroningen.bsky.social | Computational Social Scientist.

https://sofiag1l.github.io
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sof14g1l.bsky.social
Sofia Gil-Clavel @sof14g1l.bsky.social · May 22
The first research project where I am PI, “Responsible use of Artificial Intelligence in government agencies”, was selected by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to seek sponsorship!

Everything is in Dutch, but it can be translated with the Google translate plugin.
Verantwoord AI-gebruik bij overheidsinstanties - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Verantwoord AI-gebruik bij overheidsinstanties
vu.nl
sof14g1l.bsky.social
Ooh well, it seems students do not like my way of teaching...
There are days when academia is tough.
November 10, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
jmcphers.bsky.social
My keynote about data science tools at posit::conf is now online! I originally meant it to be a talk about Positron, but as I was writing it, it took a left turn through the history of RStudio and into the philosophy of tool design & how to build stuff for people.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGre...
10 Years of Data Science Tools...and What Happens Next (Jonathan McPherson) | posit::conf(2025)
YouTube video by Posit PBC
www.youtube.com
November 7, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
kjhealy.co
I gave the closing keynote at posit::conf in September and it's available to watch. When you find yourself giving a talk with a little tiny microphone stuck to the side of your head you have to ask yourself some hard questions, but the talk was partly about that.

youtu.be/ZamPCbvBAgE
Trustworthy Data Visualization (Kieran Healy, Duke University) | posit::conf(2025)
YouTube video by Posit PBC
youtu.be
November 7, 2025 at 9:20 PM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
How depended are societies to the internet?

Check the last #LongRead from the @theguardian.com for an eye opening story:
Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet
open.spotify.com
November 7, 2025 at 6:31 AM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
pettertornberg.com
Most people study what misinformation says.

We decided to study how it looks.

Using novel multi-modal AI methods, we study 17,848 posts by top climate denial accounts - and uncovered a new front in the misinformation war.

Here's what it means 🧵

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
November 4, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
indiiigo.bsky.social
Do LLMs represent the people they're supposed simulate or provide personalized assistance to?

We review the current literature in our #ACL2025 Findings paper and investigating what researchers conclude about the demographic representativeness of LLMs:
osf.io/preprints/so...

1/
Screenshot of our paper "Missing the Margins: A Systematic Literature Review on the Demographic Representativeness of LLMs" Details about what we annotated in our systematic review
July 21, 2025 at 10:12 AM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
odissei.bsky.social
Are you looking for a way to analyse textual data? @sof14g1l.bsky.social
describes how the researchers can interact with AmCat, Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolkit
#ODISSEI2025
November 4, 2025 at 2:21 PM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
Are you at the #ODISSEI conference?
Then don't forget to pass by my poster, where I talk about what shapes the #ClimateChange narrative in #Mexico.
November 4, 2025 at 11:26 AM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
"For the sick, the anxious, the isolated and many other vulnerable people who may lack medical resources and attention, AI’s vast knowledge base, coupled with its affirming and empathetic tone, can make the bots feel like wise and comforting partners."
‘DeepSeek is humane. Doctors are more like machines’: my mother’s worrying reliance on AI for health advice
The Long read: Tired of a two-day commute to see her overworked doctor, my mother turned to tech for help with her kidney disease. She bonded with the bot so much I was scared she would refuse to see ...
www.theguardian.com
October 28, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
dbellingradt.bsky.social
Nothing to see here? Well, this is a slow moving 🧵 for #skystorians and others about #eyeglasses of the past, about how to read in the past, where to buy eyeglasses, and how to do with them in general. The hashtag is #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Let's roll.
Detail of the "Glasses Apostle" painting in the altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany. Painted by Conrad von Soest in 1403, the painting is considered to be among the oldest depictions of eyeglasses north of the Alps
October 27, 2025 at 10:28 AM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
carlbergstrom.com
Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.
Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory
An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC
www.bbc.co.uk
October 24, 2025 at 5:21 AM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
anavaldi.bsky.social
Very glad to see this piece by the @nytimes.com on data center struggles from Mexico to Ireland:

"Government support worldwide has helped tech firms build with little accountability, said Ana Valdivia, an Oxford University lecturer studying data center development."

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...
From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy
www.nytimes.com
October 21, 2025 at 7:40 AM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
jowolff.bsky.social
This well-known aquatint by Goya came to mind as symbolising where we are right now. It’s called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
Monotone image of man asleep at a desk surrounded by monsters.
October 20, 2025 at 6:07 AM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
carlbergstrom.com
This morning my ChatGPT quota was inexplicably exhausted.

It took a while but I pieced it together. Voice mode somehow got activated when I went to bed.

The bot then engaged in a 10 hour conversation with my snoring dog, answering questions the pup wasn’t asking and praising him for his insight.
October 18, 2025 at 9:04 AM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
🫶🫶
jenchristiansen.com Jen Christiansen @jenchristiansen.com · 26d
We used @sciam.bsky.social's 180th anniversary as an excuse to revisit an old favorite. Familiar with the efficiency of locomotion chart from the March 1973 issue? Here it is again, reimagined for 2025 by DTAN Studio, w/text by @parshallison.bsky.social 📊 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...
The Most Efficient Traveler Isn’t a Bird or a Fish—It’s You on a Bike
A famous graphic, now updated, compares locomotion in the animal kingdom
www.scientificamerican.com
October 18, 2025 at 11:00 AM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
It just started!
sof14g1l.bsky.social Sofia Gil-Clavel @sof14g1l.bsky.social · Oct 9
Added 🗓✅️
ucdavislaw.bsky.social UC Davis School of Law @ucdavislaw.bsky.social · Oct 9
We are looking forward to this talk next Tuesday with Dr.
@timnitgebru.bsky.social
about the history of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) movement and its link to the 20th-century eugenics movement.

➡️ In-person and via livestream: bit.ly/42kxaQV

#AGI #AI #ArtificialIntelligence
October 14, 2025 at 7:09 PM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
My favorite #sport is running from one platform to another to catch my #train. 👟

#HighAdrenaline #NS.nl
October 13, 2025 at 7:57 AM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
Added 🗓✅️
ucdavislaw.bsky.social UC Davis School of Law @ucdavislaw.bsky.social · Oct 9
We are looking forward to this talk next Tuesday with Dr.
@timnitgebru.bsky.social
about the history of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) movement and its link to the 20th-century eugenics movement.

➡️ In-person and via livestream: bit.ly/42kxaQV

#AGI #AI #ArtificialIntelligence
October 9, 2025 at 7:01 PM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
This week was hectic. Puuuf.🫠
October 3, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
societal-analytics.nl
#AmCAT is proudly developed by the @societal-analytics.nl

You can learn more about it in the:
* Book: amcat.nl/book/
* Blog post: societal-analytics.nl/blogs/202501...
medem.bsky.social MEDem @medem.bsky.social · Sep 30
Day 2 of the #MEDemConference at @gesis.org starts with powerful tool demos:
🔍 AmCAT @sof14g1l.bsky.social on enabling large-scale text analysis of media & political debates.
🌐 HarDIS @sziaja.bsky.social on harmonizing and sustaining cross-national democracy data (surveys, parties, experts).
Sofia Gil-Clavel stands at a podium presenting AmCAT at the 3rd MEDem Conference. Behind her, a slide shows the AmCAT team (Kasper Welbers, Wouter van Atteveldt, Johannes Gruber, Sofia Gil-Clavel) with the tagline: “Developed by researchers for researchers, society, and data savvy users.” Logos of MEDem, VU Amsterdam, and the Societal Analytics Lab are displayed at the top. Sebastian Ziaja stands at a podium presenting HarDIS (Harmony in the Democratic Ideological Space) at the 3rd MEDem Conference. A slide behind him shows the HarDIS team (Lea Kaftan, Paul Bederke, Selçuk Timur Uluer) with the logos of MEDem, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and OSCARS (the funding initiative).
September 30, 2025 at 9:52 AM
Reposted by Sofia Gil-Clavel
medem.bsky.social
Day 2 of the #MEDemConference at @gesis.org starts with powerful tool demos:
🔍 AmCAT @sof14g1l.bsky.social on enabling large-scale text analysis of media & political debates.
🌐 HarDIS @sziaja.bsky.social on harmonizing and sustaining cross-national democracy data (surveys, parties, experts).
Sofia Gil-Clavel stands at a podium presenting AmCAT at the 3rd MEDem Conference. Behind her, a slide shows the AmCAT team (Kasper Welbers, Wouter van Atteveldt, Johannes Gruber, Sofia Gil-Clavel) with the tagline: “Developed by researchers for researchers, society, and data savvy users.” Logos of MEDem, VU Amsterdam, and the Societal Analytics Lab are displayed at the top. Sebastian Ziaja stands at a podium presenting HarDIS (Harmony in the Democratic Ideological Space) at the 3rd MEDem Conference. A slide behind him shows the HarDIS team (Lea Kaftan, Paul Bederke, Selçuk Timur Uluer) with the logos of MEDem, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and OSCARS (the funding initiative).
September 30, 2025 at 9:02 AM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
This is such a good example.
rmcelreath.bsky.social Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · Dec 3
My default explanation for sudden changes in a time series is change in measurement.

So glad to see another example, sent to me by a colleague who shares my cynicism. Short, clear explanation of Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry. Which is important to the story.
Maybe it's just YOUR testosterone that's low
How the measurement tools have led us to falsely believe our T is low
eryney.substack.com
September 25, 2025 at 11:28 AM
sof14g1l.bsky.social
Are you a social scientist that wants to learn R?

Then, you may find my course "R for Social Scientists" very useful!

I designed this course to give social scientists all that is necessary to start using R in their everyday work.

github.com/SofiaG1l/R_C...
September 24, 2025 at 6:02 AM