brendan o’connor

@brenocon.bsky.social

natural language processing, social science, umass, western mass
http://brenocon.com he/him

@brenocon.bsky.social

great work & folks at #colm2026 but i'll remember the oakland airport connector train ride. within 8 minutes you see
- AI billboard
- trailer park
- piles of trash with people picking through them

welcome to the bay area i guess

@avisokay.bsky.socialReposted by @brenocon.bsky.social

Looking forward to the Text as Data conference on Monday at UC Berkeley! I will be presenting our new paper "Multi-Perspective LLM Annotations for Valid Analyses in Subjective Tasks" which is a joint effort with Navya Mehrotra and @gligoric.bsky.social. 🧵

@cmessner.bsky.socialReposted by @brenocon.bsky.social

I'm currently located in the bay area, so I'm excited to be at #tada2026 tomorrow presenting a poster on synthetic data augmentation for domain-restricted humanities language modeling and its implications for lexical leakage. I really enjoyed my last Text as Data experience, happy to see it back

@mariaa.bsky.socialReposted by @brenocon.bsky.social

#TADA2026 is now up on lea.ac! Full schedule, filterable by people you follow, a custom feed, and more!

(This is not part of the official TADA organization, just an experiment. Try it out and let us know what you think! Also a nice way to follow along virtually if you can't attend in person!)

A screenshot from Lea showing the conference page for TADA. The program tab is selected, and presentations are filtered by "People I follow." Each resulting presentation includes the title, presenters, location, time, a topic tag, and the person (or people) presenting whom I follow.
@brenocon.bsky.social

This year UMass Amherst CICS will be hiring tenure-track faculty in natural language processing! Job ad to be posted soon. For anyone at #TADA2026 or #COLM2026 this week, I or my colleague Hamed Zamani would love to chat or answer questions about it - just say hi or send me an email to meet!

@markhisted.orgReposted by @brenocon.bsky.social

Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.

@brenocon.bsky.social

anthropomorphising organizations or even their data is kinda reasonable. "the social security (admin|database) thinks you're eligible for a penson" as for how much they have agency or can hold beliefs, LLMs are somewhere between an organization and a dataset?

@naitian.orgReposted by @brenocon.bsky.social

If you haven't yet registered for TADA 2026 on October 5th (day before COLM), registration is open to the public! Detailed schedule forthcoming, but lots of fantastic posters and talks.

We even have a second half-day of lightning talks scheduled!

tada2026.eventbrite.com

@brenocon.bsky.social

The deadline has been extended to Monday, August 3 --

Denis@dpeskoff.bsky.social

Do you work across computational methods, social sciences, and the humanities? Submit to Text as Data 2026! 📄 One-page submissions 🔓 Non-archival ⏰ Due August 1 📍 October 5 @UCBerkeley tada2026.org