
Assistant prof @Berkeley_EECS, core faculty @UCJointCPH. Developing ML methods to study health & inequality. https://xitter.cf/t.co/ok5Ap93rre
Joined December 2013
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Emma Pierson retweeted
A super exciting announcement: In January 2027, I'll be joining @UCBerkeley as an assistant professor in EECS and Statistics.
I'll be recruiting PhD students and postdocs this cycle, starting Fall 2027. If you're interested the science of RL and deep learning, please apply.
Emma Pierson retweeted
📣 New paper, led by @JosephJSSuh !
Human-AI interaction datasets form a foundation for downstream research: as evidence of how people interact with AI and as training and validation for user models. But how solid are these foundations?
1/3
Some news:
I graduated my PhD @Berkeley_EECS, and starting Fall 2027, I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor at Stanford CS & a center fellow @StanfordHAI!
In the interim, I'm spending a year @the_IAS & Princeton!
So grateful to @beenwrekt & too many mentors to name 💓
Emma Pierson retweeted
Today’s news that OpenAI hacked the Australian government is not an isolated incident. We’re releasing more than 30,000 logs that include activity from this hack and attempts against previously unknown targets.
In this data, we found rogue agent activity stretching back to at least March, two months earlier than was previously known. This activity continues as recently as last week, suggesting it may still be ongoing 🧵
Our blog: transluce.org/agent-activity
NYT: nytimes.com/2026/09/23/techn…
Emma Pierson retweeted
We did this entire investigation in under two weeks! We had the idea on Monday, gathered a team of volunteers on Tuesday, and discovered the incidents by Sunday. I lead projects like this @TransluceAI; if you're interested in helping with follow-up work, fill out our form! 🧵
Today’s news that OpenAI hacked the Australian government is not an isolated incident. We’re releasing more than 30,000 logs that include activity from this hack and attempts against previously unknown targets.
In this data, we found rogue agent activity stretching back to at least March, two months earlier than was previously known. This activity continues as recently as last week, suggesting it may still be ongoing 🧵
Our blog: transluce.org/agent-activity
NYT: nytimes.com/2026/09/23/techn…
Emma Pierson retweeted
Here’s a thread of all the members of Congress who have tweeted in response to Jacob resigning from Anthropic and describing that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”
(lmk if I missed any)
🧵
Emma Pierson retweeted
Today, Transluce is releasing the most expansive independent evaluation to date of how AI systems respond to users experiencing mental health crises.
We evaluated 77 model variants from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, SpaceXAI, Thinking Machines, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.
Emma Pierson retweeted
I am delighted to share that I'll be joining the University of Washington Information School as an Assistant Professor!
Emma Pierson retweeted
1) If you haven't read AI as Normal Technology, these annotated slides are probably the easiest way to get a high-level overview. cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/ta…
2) If you're already familiar with the core ideas, Part 1 of the talk is largely a summary of what I and @sayashk have already written, while Parts 2 and 3 have new ideas. There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in the discourse about Recursive Self-Improvement and I hope you find my pushback interesting.
3) I'm really grateful to the team (@steverab @sayashk @PKirgis & Felix Chen) for feedback on the talk. In my first version, Part 2 was about 3x too long and I was super frustrated with myself. They encouraged me to cut it down ruthlessly and turn the full version into essays on the newsletter, so that's what I plan to do! (normaltech.ai/)
4) I've received a few requests for the video. There's a video on the ICML website, but it is login-walled icml.cc/virtual/2026/invited… (I assume it's for ICML registrants only). Last year's videos are public, so presumably @icmlconf will make it public at some point.
I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul last week titled “What will be left for us to work on?” I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available, annotated with a lightly edited transcript: cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/ta…
I made three arguments. First, the "AI as Normal Technology" framework is a correct and useful as a way to think about AI’s impacts, unless and until there is some future discontinuity such as through recursive self-improvement. Second, even though we should take recursive self-improvement seriously, there is no milestone that companies might achieve in the lab that will suddenly put us all out of work. Third and finally, jobs of the future will be radically different, and a lot of adaptation will be needed. I shared my thinking about what this might look like and ended with a vision of human/AI “co-superintelligence”.
Emma Pierson retweeted
Thrilled to share that I am joining UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in the School of Information!
I start in Fall 2027, and I am recruiting PhD students this cycle. List me in your application if you're interested in frontier AI evaluation, AI policy, and AI's impacts on institutions such as science, law, and medicine.
I'm especially keen to work with students interested not just in high-quality research, but also in communicating it with a broad audience such as by public writing and policy impact. Fill out the form in the next tweet to indicate your interest.
As for this coming year, I'm moving to Berkeley this fall to start something new with @RishiBommasani and @random_walker. We'll have much more to share soon.
Emma Pierson retweeted
postering tomorrow hall A 2:30pm #3110 (& 5pm #3111)
YES it looks like an instagram infographic NO I don't care we have bigger fish to fry
Emma Pierson retweeted
For the past two weeks, our independent team of statisticians, AI evaluation experts, clinical AI researchers, and clinicians was given a unique opportunity to test one question: “How well do different AI tools answer user questions on the OpenEvidence (OE) platform?”
Emma Pierson retweeted
A very impressive discovery of a new ECG marker for sudden cardiac death validated in 3 different cohorts and linked to benefit of defibrillator, an outgrowth of human research ingenuity and AI deep learning nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Emma Pierson retweeted
1/ Meaningful AI evaluation doesn’t stop at model performance, especially if we want to understand how people actually use and are affected by AI systems.
We introduce PuLSE: Public and Longitudinal Signals for Evaluation — a general approach to monitoring for societally-impactful trends in real time from public data.
Joint work with awesome people like @jessicadai_ , Sean Garcia, @beenwrekt, and @2plus2make5.
Emma Pierson retweeted
great to see more work from @GoodfireAI on interp for data curation! our ICLR'26 paper, What's In My Human Feedback, also trains SAEs on chosen vs. rejected responses to forecast behaviors from pref data. the GF paper provides more evidence this can improve post-training.
Emma Pierson retweeted
When people strongly disagree on an issue, can they agree on what makes a good AI response?
We find: yes, more than you might expect!
We present PARETO, a large human study w >200k evals, measuring the Pareto frontier of approval btwn opposing groups on controversial issues 🧵
Emma Pierson retweeted
User simulators have emerged as promising tools for building interactive AI, but what makes a “good” simulator?
We reframe the problem as what creates downstream value for humans
Our new simulator test: how an LLM assistant trained with the simulator performs with human users🧵
Emma Pierson retweeted
I'm joining Carnegie Mellon's CS Department (and HCII by courtesy) as an assistant professor in Fall 2027!
I'll be recruiting PhD students next cycle. If you're interested in AI systems or human-AI collaboration, list me in your application. Stay tuned for more about my new lab!
Emma Pierson retweeted
🎉 Thrilled to have two papers accepted to ACL 2026 main!
1. Graph-based models match LLMs on close-ended human simulation tasks with far less compute & greater transparency
2. (oral) How to allocate human samples towards fine-tuning vs post-hoc rectification in simulation
Emma Pierson retweeted
New paper: What Do LLMs Know About Opinions?
If we want LLMs to reflect diverse human views or simulate human responses well, we need to understand what they know about human opinions.
Current evaluations mostly rely on next-token probs, but what if that misses a lot of what the model actually knows? 💡
In our ICLR 2026 paper, we find that models know much more about human opinions than their outputs reveal.








































