Dr. Matias Valdenegro
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mvaldenegro.bsky.social
Dr. Matias Valdenegro
@mvaldenegro.bsky.social
250 followers 1.1K following 6 posts
Tenured Asst Prof at the Uni Groningen, Uncertainty in Machine Learning, Robotics, Chilean, Photographer, Feminist, Snoopy lover, Dr #latinXinAI
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mvaldenegro.bsky.social
Hack the planet!
lookitup.baby Ian Coldwater 📦💥 @lookitup.baby · Sep 15
Today is the 30th anniversary of Hackers
the cast of Hackers (1995) posing in a series of adjacent phone booths
September 16, 2025 at 11:06 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
georgetakei.bsky.social
No, you did not give those of us who happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor any due process. And that was profoundly wrong. It destroyed our lives.
August 8, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
aolteanu.bsky.social
We have to talk about rigor in AI work and what it should entail. The reality is that impoverished notions of rigor do not only lead to some one-off undesirable outcomes but can have a deeply formative impact on the scientific integrity and quality of both AI research and practice 1/
Print screen of the first page of a paper pre-print titled "Rigor in AI: Doing Rigorous AI Work Requires a Broader, Responsible AI-Informed Conception of Rigor" by Olteanu et al. Paper abstract: "In AI research and practice, rigor remains largely understood in terms of methodological rigor -- such as whether mathematical, statistical, or computational methods are correctly applied. We argue that this narrow conception of rigor has contributed to the concerns raised by the responsible AI community, including overblown claims about AI capabilities. Our position is that a broader conception of what rigorous AI research and practice should entail is needed. We believe such a conception -- in addition to a more expansive understanding of (1) methodological rigor -- should include aspects related to (2) what background knowledge informs what to work on (epistemic rigor); (3) how disciplinary, community, or personal norms, standards, or beliefs influence the work (normative rigor); (4) how clearly articulated the theoretical constructs under use are (conceptual rigor); (5) what is reported and how (reporting rigor); and (6) how well-supported the inferences from existing evidence are (interpretative rigor). In doing so, we also aim to provide useful language and a framework for much-needed dialogue about the AI community's work by researchers, policymakers, journalists, and other stakeholders."
June 18, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
iandunt.bsky.social
We despise immigrants for not putting down roots, even as we make sure that it is impossible for them to do so. We do this because we have no idea what we want.

open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...
May 16, 2025 at 9:50 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
mehdirhasan.bsky.social
I'm embarrassed for the New York Times that they published this piece on Ms. Rachel, in which they cite a ridiculous anonymous righwing website Stopantisemitism while indulging the mad, mad claim she may be funded by Hamas (!).

This isn't journalism:
Why Tot Celebrity Ms. Rachel Waded Into the Gaza Debate
www.nytimes.com
May 15, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
chris-noone.bsky.social
Just out! Our peer-reviewed critique of the Cass Review has been published by BMC Medical Research Methodology. Please read and share. We show that the Cass Review is fatally flawed and should not be the basis for policy or practice in transgender healthcare.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
May 10, 2025 at 12:31 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
mkirchhof.bsky.social
Aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are clear-cut concepts, right? ... right? 😵‍💫 In our new ICLR blogpost we let different schools of thought speak and contradict each other, and revisit chatbots where “the character of aleatory ‘transforms’ into epistemic” iclr-blogposts.github.io/2025/blog/re...
May 8, 2025 at 8:18 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
mariopro.bsky.social
@bagleycartoons.bsky.social
May 6, 2025 at 10:38 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
gautamkamath.com
I wrote a post on how to connect with people (i.e., make friends) at CS conferences. These events can be intimidating so here's some suggestions on how to navigate them

I'm late for #ICLR2025 #NAACL2025, but in time for #AISTATS2025 #ICML2025! 1/3
kamathematics.wordpress.com/2025/05/01/t...
Tips on How to Connect at Academic Conferences
I was a kinda awkward teenager. If you are a CS researcher reading this post, then chances are, you were too. How to navigate social situations and make friends is not always intuitive, and has to …
kamathematics.wordpress.com
May 1, 2025 at 12:57 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
wired.com
When an AI model for code-editing company Cursor hallucinated a new rule, users revolted. www.wired.com/story/cursor...
An AI Customer Service Chatbot Made Up a Company Policy—and Created a Mess
When an AI model for code-editing company Cursor hallucinated a new rule, users revolted.
www.wired.com
April 19, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
samhalpert.bsky.social
Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.
April 15, 2025 at 2:56 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
georgetakei.bsky.social
I see it. I have lived it. 83 years ago, the U.S. government turned upon a group of its own citizens and residents and sent them to internment camps without due process. I was there among them. American fascism is back. It is here. It is now.
A tweet by Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25 ) reads: "He’s threatening media companies who are critical of him. He’s talking about sending Americans to foreign prisons. He’s signing executive orders to investigate former staff members who spoke out against him. Don’t you see what’s happening here?"
April 15, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
kordinglab.bsky.social
So I am leading this group building great teaching materials for scientific rigor (c4r.io). Their first unit is really coming together and I will teach it (Monday, April 21, 2025, 12:00 -1:00pm EST) to see how well it works. Join us: forms.monday.com/forms/7d978e...
Community for Rigor
Reliable research can be complicated to create. So we made a network of essential resources to help you better understand the principles and practices of scientific rigor.Why trust us? Because we’re a...
C4R.io
April 8, 2025 at 11:05 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
mariaa.bsky.social
I've really enjoyed reading this "workography" by Kees van Deemter, whom I've never met but who has had a long career in NLP. Lots of storytelling and reflections on research, moving between institutions and countries, finding mentors, choosing between academia and industry, and more.
One of the lessons that I’ve learnt from my work-related travel is that researchers across the globe are incredibly similar in their knowledge, skills, manner of working, and general outlook. Suppose you board a plane on your way to a conference and you land in a foreign country where, at first sight, everything appears to be different. Then, once you’ve managed to find the venue, you enter a room, and you start interacting with the people in it. Suddenly everything is familiar. Because, regardless of where they are from, the people in the room have read the same research papers as you, and they’ve had a very similar education. It’s almost – well, almost – as if you’d never left your home. Over the years, I’ve found that the humble learn quickly. With hindsight, at this stage of my career, I was not humble enough: I believed, quite absolutely, in the skills I had learnt in Amsterdam, and it took me a long time to absorb the skills of my new colleagues. For example, IPO was full of people who excelled in experimental design and hypothesis testing. I should have learnt from them, but I only started making an effort after a number of years. It’s a gap in my knowledge that I’ve only much later been able to plug. Another source of insight was the director of the IPO, Herman Bouma, who led the Institute in exemplary fashion. Sometimes he found opportunities to teach us some lessons, for instance in his meetings with IPO’s workers’ union, which I chaired for a few years. Here is one such lesson (reproduced as faithfully as memory allows): When you’re young, you should work to improve in your areas of weakness; when you’re older, you should do the things you’re good at. – Maybe now, at 68, is a good time for me to finally take the second part of this lesson to heart.
April 9, 2025 at 9:34 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
ai-firehose.column.social
This study introduces a method for calibrating certainty expressions, transforming phrases like "Maybe" into probability distributions. This enhances decision-making for radiologists and fine-tunes AI models, improving uncertainty communication. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04315
Calibrating Expressions of Certainty
ArXiv link for Calibrating Expressions of Certainty
arxiv.org
April 3, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
sungkim.bsky.social
A Gentle Introduction to Machine Learning Theory! by Ryoma Sato

data-processing.club/theory/
A Gentle Introduction to Machine Learning Theory - Data Processing Club
Share This PostWhen I first began learning about machine learning, I struggled with the notion that lowering the loss on the training data does not necessarily guarantee performance on the test data, ...
data-processing.club
April 4, 2025 at 1:25 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
tmlr-pub.bsky.social
How to Leverage Predictive Uncertainty Estimates for Reducing Catastrophic Forgetting in Online C...

Giuseppe Serra, Ben Werner, Florian Buettner

Action editor: Emmanuel Bengio

https://openreview.net/forum?id=dczXe0S1oL

#forgetting #memory #forget
April 2, 2025 at 12:07 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
assignedmale.bsky.social
March 31st is Trans Day of Visibility.
March 31, 2025 at 9:07 PM
mvaldenegro.bsky.social
Enjoying this game very much!
March 26, 2025 at 11:38 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
abeba.bsky.social
despite popularised beliefs, LLMs are not fit for medical applications. SoTA models produce "non-trivial levels of hallucinations" even w inference techniques like CoT & search augmented generation: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05777

of surveyed clinicians, 53% use LLMs daily & 91% encountered hallucinations
March 22, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
han-b.bsky.social
While reading Ben Recht's article, I found Foster & Hart (2021) (arxiv.org/abs/2210.07169) quite interesting. The contribution is a proposal of always-calibrated forecaster based on a continuously-relaxed calibration measure. But I actually love their §1.1 motivating calibration.
March 22, 2025 at 12:03 AM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
weidingerlaura.bsky.social
📣 New paper! The field of AI research is increasingly realising that benchmarks are very limited in what they can tell us about AI system performance and safety. We argue and lay out a roadmap toward a *science of AI evaluation*: arxiv.org/abs/2503.05336 🧵
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
lnkd.in
March 20, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
markriedl.bsky.social
91% of medical professionals using LLMs have encountered hallucinations and 84% believe they could impact patient health arxiv.org/abs/2503.05777
Medical Hallucinations in Foundation Models and Their Impact on Healthcare
Foundation Models that are capable of processing and generating multi-modal data have transformed AI's role in medicine. However, a key limitation of their reliability is hallucination, where inaccura...
arxiv.org
March 19, 2025 at 11:09 PM
Reposted by Dr. Matias Valdenegro
mehdirhasan.bsky.social
"Germany Tried to Silence Me, a UN Official, for Talking About Israel’s Genocidal War in Gaza"

In an exclusive piece for Zeteo, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese writes about her 5-day trip that exposed Germany's harsh deviation from democratic values:
Germany Tried to Silence Me, a UN Official, for Talking About Israel’s Genocidal War in Gaza
Francesca Albanese on her five-day trip that exposed Germany's harsh deviation from democratic values and shrinking landscape for freedom of expression.
zeteo.com
March 19, 2025 at 5:56 PM