News

2024-12-11: Bob gave talk at Wikimedia Research Showcase about “Language Models for Wikimedia: A Report from the Trenches and a Call to Arms”
2024-12-06: Congrats to former PhD student Manoel Horta Ribeiro for receiving an EPFL Doctoral Program Thesis Distinction award!
2024-09-06: Bob will be on sabbatical with Microsoft Research Redmond from September 2024 through July 2025.
2024-09-06: Congrats to dlab graduate Akhil Arora for joining Aarhus University’s computer science department as an assistant professor!
2024-09-06: Congrats to Chris Wendler, Veniamin Veselovsky, and Giovanni Monea for winning an ACL 2024 Outstanding Paper Award for the paper “Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers”! And congrats to Zachary Horvitz and his Columbia team for winning an ACL 2024 Outstanding Paper Award for the paper “Getting Serious about Humor: Crafting Humor Datasets with Unfunny Large Language Models”!
2024-06-06: Congrats to Giuseppe Russo and Manoel Horta Ribeiro for winning the ICWSM 2024 Best Paper Award for the paper “Stranger Danger! Cross-Community Interactions with Fringe Users Increase the Growth of Fringe Communities on Reddit”!
2024-05-24: Congrats to dlab graduate Manoel Horta Ribeiro for joining Princeton’s computer science department in 2025 as an assistant professor!
2024-05-20: Radio interview with RTS CQFD about orphan articles on Wikipedia
2024-05-16: Bob gave his inaugural lecture. Check out the recording for an easy-to-digest overview of what we work on at dlab, why it excites us, and why it matters.
2024-05-09: News article in Science featuring our work on LLM usage on crowdsourcing platforms. (See here for more news coverage.)
2024-03-07: Bob got tenure!
2024-02-23: Bob participated in gathering organized by Wikimedia Foundation at Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on the topic of “AI and the Knowledge Commons”, where a preliminary research agenda was drafted for how projects such as Wikimedia’s can benefit from AI while guarding against its risks.
2023-12-14: Congrats to former PhD student Kristina Gligorić for receiving an EPFL Doctoral Program Thesis Distinction award!
2023-12-12: Bob participated in panel discussion at Wikimedia Research Showcase on “A Year of Generative AI: Future Directions for Wikimedia”
2023-10-26: Radio interview with RTS “Tout un monde” about Quotebank
2023-03-07: Congrats to PhD student Manoel Horta Ribeiro for being nominated as one of Forbes’ 2023 “30 Under 30”!
2022-12-09: Teams including dlab members won 1st prize and 3rd prize at LauzHack, a hackathon with 250 participants. Congrats, Venia Veselovsky, Jozef Coldenhoff, and teams! [Photos]
2022-11-18: SNSF Starting Grant for project “Self-Supervised NLP: From Text to Knowledge and Back” — great injection of energy to propel our research direction on neuro-symbolic NLP!
2022-11-18: dlab member Kristina Gligorić successfully defended her PhD thesis. Congrats, Kristina, and have a great start at Stanford!
2022-08-08: Our proposal “Plan-Before-You-Implement: A Higher-Level Reasoning Paradigm for Language Models of Code” was accepted for funding via the Google Research Collabs program. Thanks, Google!
2022-08-01: Congrats to Martin Josifoski (dlab PhD student) for winning a Swiss Data Science Center PhD Fellowship on “Better Decoding Algorithms for Large Language Models”!
2022-07-15: For talks about our research, check out our YouTube channel!
2022-06-24: dlab has just output its first PhD students: congrats, Tiziano Piccardi and Ramtin Yazdanian!
2022-06-10: Bob West received Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award at ICWSM 2022
2022-01-01: Starting new project on “Invariant Federated Learning: Decentralized Training of Robust Privacy-Preserving Models”, funded by Microsoft Swiss Joint Research Center. Thanks, Microsoft!
2021-06-14: Our paper on Political Polarization in Online News Consumption won the Best Paper Award at ICWSM 2021. Thanks to our great collaborators at MIT and Mozilla!
2021-04-23: dlab PhD student Manoel Horta Ribeiro received Facebook Graduate Fellowship. Congrats, Manoel!
2021-03-19: Four new ICWSM papers released (see publications).
2021-03-09: New data release: “Quotebank: A Corpus of Quotations from a Decade of News”, containing 178 million unique, speaker-attributed quotations extracted from 196 million English news articles crawled from over 377,000 Web domains between 2008 and 2020 [WSDM paper]
2021-03-09: As part of the Microsoft Turing Academic Program (MS-TAP), we are getting private preview access to Microsoft’s Turing family of natural language models and will try to make them more robust. Looking forward to collaborating with Microsoft on this!
2021-02-09: We are co-organizing the Wiki Workshop 2021 (14 April 2021) at The Web Conference 2021.
2020-12-18: New dataset released: YouNiverse: Large-Scale Channel and Video Metadata from English-Speaking YouTube
2020-09-25: Talk videos about SecVM and Brevity released.
2020-09-17: Releasing Google Trends Anchor Bank (G-TAB), an easy-to-use Python library for calibrating Google Trends time series without being compromised by rounding errors [7-min summary video] [CIKM paper].
2020-09-04: New dataset released: WikiHist.html: English Wikipedia’s Full Revision History in HTML Format
2020-06-03: Two articles about our recent work on the effectiveness of different spokespersons on convincing people to maintain social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
2020-05-29: Video recording of Workshop on Innovative Ideas in Data Science (IID) (held online at The Web Conference on April 20, 2020) is now online here.
2020-01-29: Check out our new TheWebConf/WWW papers on “Sprinkling Lightweight Vocabulary Learning into Everyday Information Diets” and “Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia”!
2019-12-18: Our paper on “Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube” ranks #89 among the 100 most discussed research outputs of 2019, according to Altmetric (and #3 among those in the Information and Computing Sciences).
2019-12-18: Working hard to get Applied Machine Learning Days 2020 on the road, to happen at EPFL on January 25–29.
2019-12-18: Co-organizing the Wiki Workshop 2020 (April 21, 2020) and Workshop on Innovative Ideas in Data Science (IID) (April 20, 2020), both co-located with The Web Conference 2020 in Taipei, Taiwan – submit a paper or extended abstract!
2019-10-25: Blog post about our ICWSM’19 paper on “Eliciting New Wikipedia Users’ Interests via Automatically Mined Questionnaires”
2019-09-05: New CSCW paper on “Causal Effects of Brevity on Style and Success in Social Media” (ironically, it’s 23 pages long…).
2019-08-19: Facebook is supporting our work on crosslingual embeddings with a generous Research Award – thanks so much, Facebook!
2019-07-08: Amusing (distorted?) blog post by Aisling Irwin about our work on message distortion
2019-06-20: Outstanding Paper Award for our ICWSM’19 paper on “Eliciting New Wikipedia Users’ Interests via Automatically Mined Questionnaires” – congrats, Ramtin! [photo]
2019-04-01: dlab will receive project funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation – four more years of Wikipedia research guaranteed!
2019-01-01: Excited to start working on “Monitoring, Modelling, and Modifying Dietary Habits and Nutrition Based on Large-Scale Digital Traces”, in collaboration with, and funded by, Microsoft Research.
2019-01-01: Kicking off an exciting new project on “Mellowing Extreme Views via Celebrity Spokespeople – but Gently”, funded jointly by the University of Lausanne and EPFL via Collaborative Research on Science and Society (CROSS), in collaboration with Ahmad Abu-Akel.
2018-12-11: Co-organizing the Wiki Workshop 2019 on May 13/14, 2019, co-located with The Web Conference 2019 in San Francisco – submit a paper or extended abstract!
2018-04-30: Co-organizing Computation and Society Workshop at EPFL on May 22, 2018. Join us for this important discussion!
2018-04-19: New ICWSM papers released [1, 2, 3].
2018-04-19: Google is supporting our lab with a Google Faculty Research Award. Thanks a lot, Google!
2018-04-19: Co-organizing a session on Data Science and Machine Learning for Development and Humanitarian Action at the 2018 International Tech4Dev Conference at EPFL on June 27, 2018, with some exciting keynote speakers. (Press)
2018-04-06: Bob was quoted in an article about creativity and AI in NZZ am Sonntag (in German; PDF).
2018-04-01: Kicking off the Human Measurement Project, funded by the Swiss Data Science Center.
2018-03-20: Our work on Wikipedia hoaxes mentioned in Motherboard article: Can Wikipedia Solve YouTube’s Conspiracy Theory Problem?
2018-03-20: Short video explaining our work on Wikipedia hoaxes.
2018-03-16: New Wikimedia Foundation blog post about our ongoing work about why the world reads Wikipedia.
2018-03-16: New WWW paper released: When Sheep Shop: Measuring Herding Effects in Product Ratings with Natural Experiments.
2017-12-22: Looking forward to the 2018 Applied Machine Learning Days, which we’re organizing at EPFL on January 27–30. Before the main conference, there will be many exciting workshops, including Girlscoding: Teaching Computers How to Think (video).
2017-12-19: Join us for the Wiki Workshop 2018 on April 24, 2018, co-located with The Web Conference in Lyon, France – submit a paper or extended abstract!
2017-12-19: dlab team (Gael Lederrey, Ramtin Yazdanian, Tiziano Piccardi, Tugrulcan Elmas) wins prize for their entry to the Credit Suisse challenge on fraud and money laundering pattern detection at the LauzHack hackathon.
2017-12-01: dlab celebrates its first birthday!
2017-05-30: Interview on Radio Télévision Suisse about Growing Wikipedia across Languages via Recommendation (see also: EPFL press release, ANSA article).
2017-05-10: Open projects for MS and BS students posted.
2017-03-30: We have a postdoc position available. Please help us spread the word, and if you’re a motivated candidate yourself, consider applying!
2017-03-16: ICWSM paper published on Armed Conflicts in Online News.
2017-03-16: Article on Frontiers Blog about our ongoing project on political rudeness.
2017-01-17: Our group is co-organizing the Wiki Workshop 2017 on April 4, 2017, co-located with WWW 2017 in Perth, Australia – consider submitting a paper or extended abstract!
2017-01-17: Exciting upcoming event: Applied Machine Learning Days at the SwissTech Convention Center at EPFL on January 30/31, 2017 – register now!
2017-01-13: Some good news on this Friday, the 13th: our lab has a name! It’s plain and simple: “Data Science Lab”, or “dlab” for short.