Fernando Diaz
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841io.bsky.social
Fernando Diaz
@841io.bsky.social
1.7K followers 620 following 91 posts
Associate Professor, CMU. Researcher, Google. Evaluation and design of information retrieval and recommendation systems, including their societal impacts.
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841io.bsky.social
Philip K. Dick, "The Penultimate Truth", Belmont Books, 1964.
November 11, 2025 at 3:58 PM
841io.bsky.social
Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press.
October 24, 2025 at 12:06 AM
841io.bsky.social
October 21, 2025 at 7:13 PM
841io.bsky.social
This is the most recent iteration of a series of workshops that we have been co-organizing, starting at NeurIPS 2022 (ai-cultures.github.io), where I presented this slide, anticipating the next few years (with apologies to Moritz, who I think originated the fairness version it's based on). 2/3
October 2, 2025 at 6:55 PM
841io.bsky.social
When mouse is unavailable (e.g., on mobile), you can use viewport [6]. 8/10
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM
841io.bsky.social
and reduce latency [5]. 7/10
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM
841io.bsky.social
study effects of visual presentation in advertising [3,4], 6/10
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM
841io.bsky.social
You can build models of visual attention [2], 5/10
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM
841io.bsky.social
Depending on the interface, there can be a strong correlation between eye fixation and cursor position (on search, it's about 100 pixels) [1]. This means you can use a baby amount of js to get a cheap, noisy eyetracker. With enough users, that's not too bad. 4/10
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM
841io.bsky.social
Giuliano, V.E. and P. E. Jones, "Linear Associative Information Retrieval", Rept. no. CACL-2, Arthur D. Little, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., Nov 1962, 240 p. Also in P. W. Howerton and D. C . Weeks [eds ]. "Vistas in Information Handling", 1963, p. 30-54.
ACORN-i: (Associative Content Retrieval Network) Wired for 40 sentences using 40 index terms. To pose an inquiry, the wires with the clips are attached to the terminals for the index terms and/or sentences deemed to be relevant by the user. As the large knob is turned the voltages on these wires are raised, and the neon bulbs light up in the order of "relevance" of the various sentences. Rel ative voltages on the individual wires are controlled by the other knobs. Association may be set either "free" or "narrow" by varying the setting on the lower right hand knob.
September 4, 2025 at 1:30 PM
841io.bsky.social
p epic conclusion in the og description of the sign test.

John Arbuthnot. An argument for divine providence, taken from the constant regularity observ'd in the births of both sexes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 27(328):186-190, 1710.
From hence it follows, that Polygamy is Contrary to the Law of Nature and Justice, and to the Propagation of Human Race; for where Males and and Females are in equal number, if one Male takes Twenty Wives, Nineteen Men must live in Celibacy, whith is repugnant to the Design of Nature; nor is it probable that Twenty Women will be so well impreg­nated by one Man as by Twenty.
June 29, 2025 at 9:28 PM
841io.bsky.social
Nan Laird on “Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data via the EM Algorithm" (1977),
Regarding the origin of the EM, the ideas behind EM and many examples of EM were kicking around in the literature for at least 25 years before we wrote the paper. One of the earliest references we found from the 1950s was on estimating gene frequencies in randomly mating populations. EM had been used in many different papers, but it hadn’t ever been recognised that all of these separate uses are actually part of the same general problem. And of course, we have it a name.
June 12, 2025 at 11:20 AM
841io.bsky.social
Megan was educated at the prestigious Amherst Center for Human Agent Interaction. Life at the Center was extraordinarily exciting, if taxing. Classes in the first year included agent psychology, fundamentals of agent design. human-agent social theory, statistics, and experiment design, and, because she was particularly broadminded. she audited a class on agent ethics offered by the philosophy department. In her second year, Megan began to specialize in agent pathology. Megan graduated with honors about five years ago, and took her position with Agent Failure Analysis Associates. Her current assignment is to figure out why a video distribution agent has been sending subtly disturbing movies to the Amherst Rest Home.
May 20, 2025 at 8:55 PM
841io.bsky.social
Megan works for Agent Failure Analysis Associates, and her job is to figure out why agents fail. Actually,they don't fail all that often. Some Luddites maintain that they are both dangerous and immoral, but most people acknowledge the essential role they play in today's increasingly interdependent world. For example, agents control the freeways, permitting a tenfold increase in capacity. Delays are newsworthy because they are so rare. Not everyone will read this news, o f course, because their personal agents filter it from the newswires. This is a pretty harmless use of filtering but lately there has been concern that the public at large is permitting their agents to filter too much, so the principal of an informed populace that underlies our democracy is in jeopardy. The practice of having one's personal agent vote for one is a common concern among liberal intellectuals, although a recent spot-check found that liberal intellectuals are slightly more likely to engage in this practice than other segments of society (some things never change). Whatever the social costs o f agents, there can be no doubt that energy management, transportation, and information management would be crippled without our sophisticated networks of agents. Which is why Megan's job is a desirable one by any standards.
May 20, 2025 at 8:55 PM
841io.bsky.social
vignette from,

Paul R. Cohen. Empirical methods for artificial intelligence. MIT Press, 1995.

1/3
Megan is an agent engineer, which means, as everybody knows, that she designs and builds agents. Agent engineers are in the news a lot because agents are increasingly responsible for the world infrastructure. As you can imagine, we hear about agents primarily when they fail. Just last week,an air-traffic agent failed and two airplanes collided on the runway. Other agent errors include a crash on the Fijian stock exchange, caused by an unanticipated partnership o f trading agents; a billing problem involving all 19 million subscribers to the Los Angeles public library; and the tragic demise of two hundred BARTpassengers under the San Francisco Bay, caused by the incorrect reaction o f a train-driver agent during an earthquake.
May 20, 2025 at 8:55 PM
841io.bsky.social
this morning while reading up on the lineage of the Wasserstein distance...

Toom, A. (1993). A Russian Teacher in America. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 12(2).
The main pressure that students put upon teachers was to tell them something new. A vivid example was Leonid Vaserstein (then a student) who would declare in the middle of a talk: “All this is trivial.” Taken out of situational context this may seem impolite, but actually this was quite productive. He pressed lecturers for more competence. Soon he had to emigrate. (Now he is a professor at Penn State University.)
April 10, 2025 at 2:12 PM
841io.bsky.social
📢 New Paper: "Recall, Robustness, and Lexicographic Evaluation" (ACM TORS)
F Diaz, M Ekstrand (@md.ekstrandom.net), B Mitra (@bmitra.bsky.social)

For IR, NLP, and ML researchers working on ranking systems evaluated for recall and robustness. 🧵 1/5 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
A ven diagram showing that the recall and robustness, each of which has many different conceptions, interest when thinking about recall as "totality" and robustness as "worst-case performance". It's in this intersection that lexicographic recall (lexirecall) lives.
April 7, 2025 at 4:15 PM
841io.bsky.social
and box’s “all models are wrong, but some are useful”
March 13, 2025 at 12:22 PM
841io.bsky.social
or as these clowns write.

F. Diaz and M. Madaio, Scaling Laws Do Not Scale, AIES, 2024
March 13, 2025 at 12:19 PM
841io.bsky.social
this is pretty close to what box would describe as the iteration between theory and practice.

Box, George E. P. (1976), "Science and statistics", Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71 (356): 791–799
March 13, 2025 at 12:16 PM
841io.bsky.social
Mary Helen Briscoe. Preparing scientific illustrations. Springer New York, NY, 1996.
In this drawing, equipment is represented by labeled boxes. The drawing of the dog on the tread- mill takes the place of a word box. It explains the procedure more briefly and vividly than words.
November 21, 2024 at 9:39 PM
841io.bsky.social
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Letter 38, July 16, 1683.
Figure from paper of living animals of various sizes and sorts in excrement of frogs.
November 21, 2024 at 9:36 PM
841io.bsky.social
[1]Saul Greenberg. The computer user as toolsmith: the use, reuse and organization of computer-based tools. Cambridge Series on Human-Computer Interaction. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
A figure from the paper of a Galapagos finch probing for insects with a cactus spine.
November 21, 2024 at 9:29 PM
841io.bsky.social
Richard Held and Alan Hein. Movement-produced stimulation in the development of visually guided behavior.. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 56(5):872--876, 1963.
Diagram from the paper showing the experimental apparatus where one kitten sees the world passively from a box and another sees world while walking.
November 21, 2024 at 9:25 PM