What property rights do NFTs facilitate, exactly, and what social structures will they ultimately support? I've been having fun exploring/learning about this topic with Scott Kominers, and will participate in a related panel at the Princeton University DeCenter decenter.princeton.edu/events/decente…

I just had a great time at Princeton University DeCenter on a panel about NFTs, with Laura Rodriguez🌴, Charlie Durbin, Matt Weinberg. Many thanks to the audience for not tearing us apart for claiming that NFTs will become even more important after the gold rush dies down :-)

In this upcoming UBC-O debate, I'll argue for the "optimists" that AI is poised to be a net benefit to society. The event is already sold out! Teaming up with Madeline Ransom; debating Bryce Traister and Wendy Wong. Moderated by nora3000 from Spark CBC Radio!

Giving a talk about radio spectrum reallocation, and how it can be seen as an example of AI for market design, at NBER's New Directions in Market Design Conference. You can watch live at youtube.com/watch?v=2IECuz…. I'm on at 3:40 EST. Also in my session Sven Seuken Hal Varian.

The registration site for EC2023 is now open! cvent.me/yWlWXq. The in-person conference will be at King's College London, from July 9-12. The early registration deadline is a month from now: 6/16/2023.

Progress on the Turing Test: people only correctly identified AI conversation partners 60% of the time! And, thought that over 1/4 of humans were computers! We've all been there... 🙂

ACM-EC (Economics & Computation) 2023 Preview Week is coming up June 19-23. June 19: Mentoring Workshop June 20-22: Tutorials and Poster Sessions June 23: Highlights Beyond EC and EC Contributed Mini-session Attendance is free. ec23.sigecom.org/program/previe…

⏰⏰ Just under a week to go for ACM SIGecom EC Preview week!! A quick run through of the planned activities (fully virtual) below, tl;dr: mentoring workshop registration (free!) docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… preview week registration (free!): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… (1/n)

A new paper with coauthors at AI21 Labs: given any corpus of facts, automatically generate a benchmark to quantify an LM’s propensity to generate factual instead of hallucinated/incorrect text.

Exciting news: #KDD2023 Test of Time Award for our KDD 2013 paper "Auto-WEKA". Congrats to Chris Thornton (former MSc student; his thesis work); Frank Hutter (former postdoc; now an #AutoML leader) and Holger Hoos (former UBC colleague; cosupervised Chris and Frank).

Two new courses offered by UBC CS are starting this fall, highlighting the ethical considerations of technology READ & REGISTER: ow.ly/I7ZT50PCGIO #UBC #computerscience #ethics Thomas Pasquier Giulia Toti Kevin Leyton-Brown Margo Seltzer Muhammad AbdulMageed

Congrats to Dr. Kevin Leyton Brown and co-authors for receiving a KDD 2023 Test of Time Award. Their 2013 paper brought Automated Machine Learning to the forefront ow.ly/4Xgr50PG5nN #MachineLearning Kevin Leyton-Brown CAIDA_UBC UBC Science University of British Columbia Holger Hoos Frank Hutter

I'm thrilled and honored to have been elected to Canada's The Royal Society! Congrats to my fellow UBC Science inductees: Leah Edelstein-Keshet UBC Math Department, Catherine Johnson UBC EOAS, Diane Srivastava (Srivastava Lab) UBC Zoology, Mark Van Raamsdonk UBC PHAS.

Two AI faculty positions at UBC Computer Science for our "AI Methods for Scientific Impact" cluster: seeking AI methods experts (who publish in AI's scientific core) with an interest in interdisciplinary collaboration; 5 total incl Stats, Math. Apply by Dec 15! CAIDA_UBC

📢 Check out the accepted EMNLP'23 papers from our UBC NLP group! Congratulations to all the authors and stay tuned for the camera-ready preprints! 🎉 #EMNLP2023 #ubcnlp #NLProc

New conference on Econ & AI/ML, this summer at Cornell. Nonarchival, so you can submit alongside CS conferences/journals; deadline Feb 25. All-star list of organizers, keynote speakers, and program committee. Great to see these fields moving closer together!

Announcing 2025 & 2026 AAAI Chairs! 2025: program co-chairs @ZicoKolter (CMU), Julie A. Shah (MIT); general chair Toby Walsh (UNSW). 2026: program co-chairs Chad Jenkins (uMich), Matt Taylor (Alberta); general chair Sven Koenig (USC). Thanks to all for stepping up! AAAI

A short video surveying my research on machine learning for market design and analysis (for non-specialists). Snazzy work by UBC Studios! youtu.be/EpuA2xm3tYY CAIDA_UBC UBC Computer Science

AI21 Labs releases Joint Attention and Mamba (Jamba) open model, 52B. Key innovation: Mamba (linear-time) and Transformer (quadratic) layers in 7:1 ratio, also mixture of experts. Upshot is SoE performance (~Mixtral 8x7B) with 3x throughput and 2x context (140k) on a single GPU!

A great article about my research just appeared in University of British Columbia Alumni magazine. It's perhaps the most thoughtful and accurate article that has resulted from my being interviewed by a reporter (Richard Littlemore) --except that I don't think radiologists analyze electrocardiograms🙂