INCREDIBLY excited to announce this: I collaborated with the Internet Archive to make a new 24/7 lofi livestream!

By day, you can see scanners scanning and what they're scanning, and when they're not scanning, you will see public domain silent movies and pictures. Sorta like an Internet Archive TV

Watch it LIVE here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPg2V5RVh7U

Wrote about a fun research controversy involving the finding that Irish judges are more likely to cite legal cases in rulings if they have a Wikipedia article. https://levon003.github.io/2025/05/21/wikipedia-event-impact.html

My team got a nice write-up in a blog post from The Learning Agency. I can't complain about effusive comments from my boss!
https://the-learning-agency.com/the-cutting-ed/article/tackling-the-ai-talent-shortage-how-a-collaborative-model-is-bridging-the-gap/

https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/51889-violent-dark-dirty-americans-middle-ages

A few quick notes and a simultation on overfitting in response to Ben Recht's recent blog posts: https://levon003.github.io/2025/02/04/train-test-split.html

I enjoyed this 2021 CHI paper: "Are Current Voice Interfaces Designed to Support Children’s Language Development?" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445271 Basic point: most system's conversational scaffolding is rigid and bad, it's probably not even fair to call them "conversations"!

I've spent the last two years trying to understand how LLMs might improve middle-school math education. I just published an article in the Journal of Educational Data Mining describing some of that work: "Designing Safe and Relevant Generative Chats for Math Learning in Intelligent Tutoring Systems" https://jedm.educationaldatamining.org/index.php/JEDM/article/view/840

Can recommendation systems help people find peer support online? I'll be presenting "Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment" at #CSCW2025! I first submitted this work in July 2022, so I'm happy to finally share this. https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04973

"Baltic Subsea Cables: A Story of Resilience Rather Than Fear" https://pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/baltic-subsea-cables-a-story-of-resilience-than-fear

I'm still holding out hope for Mastodon, but if you're an HCI or ML researcher here I'll mention that the Bluesky migration has blown up in the last week. A lot more activity there: https://bsky.app/profile/zwlevonian.bsky.social

Best #cscw2024 session so far: Amy Bruckman moderates a debate (among Andreas Monroy-Hernandez, Jeffrey Bigham, Meredith Morris, and Michael Bernstein) about whether human-AI interaction is CSCW.

@UlrichJunker That wasn't a term I was familiar with, but I can see the similarities. I think vote swapping/pairing is more of a tactic for undermining regional vote pooling than a vote delegation mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_pairing

Just learning about vote swapping, which I had no idea was legal in the US. Interesting idea! https://www.swapyourvote.org/

"Self-reports are better measurement
instruments than implicit measures" https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-024-00376-z

@fasterandworse Some characteristics conflict, but some align! If gen AI doesn't "burst", seems clear that the empathy posture will change a lot in coming years. (More focus on "tone", less focus on content perhaps?)

Wrote about some Wikipedia drama: Which academic journals should have articles on Wikipedia? https://levon003.github.io/2024/10/15/wikipedia-journals.html

Wrote some notes on monkey-patching Python modules for monitoring function calls, the approach used by Langfuse. https://levon003.github.io/2024/10/07/python-wrapping.html

I was spared CHI review requests this year, so I'll share publicly (on this low-visibility platform...) that I would accept a CHI review if anyone is desperate. Education, health, or quant modeling all fine.

CSCW 2025 will be in Bergen, Norway!

New article alert: I'm stoked to drop a preprint of What Copyright Can't Do, coming soon in the Pepperdine Law Review. It does what it says on the tin: it lays out a basic taxonomy of all the things that contemporary copyright law can’t do in the United States. Here’s a quick summary 🧵 1/ https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4766540