As Princeton thaws from under last week’s snow hurricane, I’m taking a moment to reflect on my first four months in the place I now call home.

This roundup post shares highlights from my first semester as a post-doc in Psychology, CITP, and Sociology.

Here in Princeton, I’m surviving winter in the best way I know how 🙂

So far, I have had an amazing experience:

• The Paluck Lab (Psychology) and the Center for IT Policy, my main anchor points at Princeton, have been welcoming and supportive. When colleagues from both departments showed up at my IgNobel Prize viewing party in my first month, I knew I had found a good home <grin>
• The Paluck Lab have become a wonderful research family, and they even did the LEGO duck challenge together with me!
  • Weekly lab meetings with the Paluck Lab have been a master-class in thinking about the relationship between research design and theory in the social sciences. I am so grateful to observe and participate in these conversations, since so much about research is unspoken, tacit knowledge.
  • With the help of my new colleagues, I’ve started to learn how to write papers for general science journals. I’ve also learned more about publishing in the field of psychology.
• At CITP, I’ve learned much about thinking simultaneously as a regulator and computer scientist.
  • I’ve deeply enjoyed my conversations with the whole crew at CITP. I’ve also come to value Ed Felten’s masterful approach to bridging complex technical and regulatory topics with clarity. I’ve definitely stolen some of his rhetorical strategies in my own talks.
  • Apply to be an IT Policy Researcher at Princeton (their word for postdoc) and join us next year (application)!
• I’ve loved the conversations at the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Policy, where I am now an affiliated postdoc
• I’m looking forward to meeting more of my colleagues in Sociology this spring, now that I’ll be physically based in Princeton more consistently

Travel and Speaking

View of the French Alps from Lausanne

• I also enjoyed some amazing, meaningful travel:
  • a week in Guatemala (my family is from Guatemala) giving a keynote at the Latin-American HCI conference and supporting computer science and social undergraduates and gradstudents. I plan to write more about this amazing experience soon.
  • lectures and seminars in London and Oxford on Christianity and Artificial Intelligence with laypeople, ministers, researchers, and leaders of Christian denominations
  • a keynote panel at the Connected 150 Conference on Digital Citizenship in Ottawa
  • a week in San Francisco, including two talks at Stanford, alongside talks at Facebook, Twitter, and Disqus
  • a trip to Aspen (gorgeous!) for the Aspen Institute roundtable on AI
  • a few days back in Boston to present research at CODE@MIT on “Community-Led Platform Governance Experiments“
  • talks at the Internet Governance Forum at the UN building in Geneva on violence against women online(video) and another talk, organized by the Digital Asia forum on the use of AI in internet governance
  • A week in Colombo, Sri Lanka at the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit <3
  • An evening in my hometown coffeeshop hearing live music and catching up with longtime friends

I’m so glad that I can scale down my travel this spring, phew!

A flock of birds takes flight in Antigua, Guatemala

Writing and Research

• I’ve submitted papers for publication; some were accepted
  • CHI 2018 accepted my paper with Merry Mou on Community-Led Experiments in Platform Governance
  • Gantman, A., Gomila, R., Martinez, J.E., Matias, J.N., Paluck, E.L., Starck, J., Wu, S. & Yaffe, N. (in press). A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication: Commentary on Zwaan et al. Brain and Behavioral Sciences.
  • (several more are under review or about to be submitted)
• I got to design a class on field experiments for undergrads and master’s students that I’m extremely excited to teach this spring
• I got to advise the remarkably-talented Jonathan Zong on a project to re-design online research ethics procedures
• Looking back, I realized that I blogged a lot more than I realized:
  • A seven-part series on Christianity and AI with Scott Hale, Lydia Manikonda, and Ken Arnold
  • A two-part series on how to audit Facebook’s News Feed:
    • How Anyone Can Audit Facebook’s News Feed
    • Attributing Cause in Algorithm Audits
  • Position statements:
    • Algorithmic Consumer Protection
    • The Benefits of Massively-Scaling Platform Research and Accountability
  • Trip reports:
    • Citizen Autonomy and Machine Intelligence: Reflections from the Aspen Institute Roundtable on AI
  • Research reports:
    • Remaking Large-Scale Behavioral Research for Democracy: New Paper at CHI 2018
    • Do Downvote Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior?
    • 3 Strategies for Accountable, Ethical Online Behavior Research
    • Citizen Behavioral Design: CivilServant Selected as an Innovation by Design Award Finalist (I later won the Tischler Award)
  • Community Outreach (several posts)
  • Liveblogs of talks at Princeton:
    • Bias and Noise: Daniel Kahneman on Errors in Decision-Making
    • How Would You Design Crypto Backdoor Regulation? Ed Felten at CITP
    • AI Mental Health Care Risks, Benefits, and Oversight: Adam Miner at Princeton
    • What Should the Information Society Be? Luciano Floridi at Princeton
    • The Cost of Partial Altruism: Oriana Bandiera at Princeton

Princeton Life

• Things that the town of Princeton has:
  • fantastic local ice cream
  • an amazing Guatemalan restaurant
  • farm stores with fresh food and live music
• I’ve been made a fellow at Mathey College and am thoroughly enjoying dinners and events with my partner Dr. H, students, and other fellows. I’ll be giving a lunch talk this spring and may organize an occasional classics reading group with Dr. H.
• I’m making life work without a car, taking advantage of my cyclocross bike, an excellent trailer, all-weather gear, a bicycle commute subsidy, and Princeton’s car share program
• I’m back to writing at a cycling desk

Rockefeller College Cloisters, Princeton. On evenings when I have dinner here, I walk through these cloisters on my way hime.