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End of year post for 2024

Dec 31, 2024

Wow, what a year 2024 has been! I realize I hardly wrote any new blog posts at all this year, mainly because I couldn’t even talk about what I’ve been doing for the better part of a year, and I’ve been very busy. I should do a bit of a retrospective, but I’ll leave that to another time. A lot has happened in 2024 in my professional life!

Work

This year has been a big one for career growth and advancement. I got promoted! I became a manager! I hired my first two direct reports! (Hiring takes so much time!) I moved to a new team! I now wear multiple hats so depending on the day I might say I am a Staff Machine Learning Researcher, a Senior Data Science Manager, or a Responsible AI Lead.

For the past year and a half my main focus at work has been on Responsible AI, specifically working on Apple Intelligence’s text features. I was the Safety lead for the Summarization feature and I am also the lead for datasets and evaluation for all other text features, including everything you can find under Writing Tools (e.g. Professional Rewrite, Friendly Rewrite, Keywords Transform) and Smart Replies. I’m also supporting several other features, including Siri, as well as the Apple Foundation Model. You can read more about this work in our technical report and blog post. I’ll write a separate post about the impact of linguists in the RAI space some time soon, I have a lot to say on this topic.

On the down side, I’ve worked absolutely ridiculous hours. Most of my collaborators are on the West Coast, and they’re senior enough that (unlike in previous years), declining meetings or insisting on EST business hours often isn’t really an option, if I want to maintain my access and impact (and I do!). Also, my full-WFH permission expired in Dec 2023, so starting in January I’ve been coming into the office 3 days a week, which adds about an hour of commute time per day that’s a total waste of time and actually kind of enraging. Starting in December I actually have a few local teammates in Cambridge, but for the first 11 months of the year I worked with exactly 0 local people.

You know the “Accidentally became important at work and it’s ruining my life” meme? Well. It wasn’t an accident but it’s definitely been an adjustment. I’ve had an order-of-magnitude more meetings this year than previously. I traveled to Apple offices on the west coast on average every 8 weeks, plus 4 trips for conferences and 2 for personal travel, which overall means So Much Travel. I also didn’t take any time off in 2024 until mid-December—because it would have just meant more work when I came back; no one would be able to pick up the slack, and that just isn’t much fun as vacations go, in my opinion. I took all this as an investment in my career for the year, and it definitely paid off. But I do hope that with more hiring we’ll get to a more manageable workload, because this isn’t really a sustainable pace, if we’re being honest.

Academics

I’ve done my best to keep up with my academics too. My paper on gender bias, which came out in late 2023, has quickly become my most-cited paper, easily outpacing my Linguistic Inquiry monograph (little sob, that monograph is based on my dissertation work and took so much more time and energy than the gender bias paper). On the other hand, it’s nice to see one’s work being frequently cited (and hopefully read!), and the size of the AIML field is very different from linguistics so it’s not really a fair comparison.

I had three co-authored papers come out in 2024—the Apple Intelligence paper, a paper on hallucinations, and a paper on protected group bias in LLMs—plus an invited handbook article which I’ve submitted but I suppose won’t be officially out until 2025. I’m already working on another handbook article and my team is working on a paper, so the churn keeps churning.

Technically, I’ve been 80% Apple/20% MIT (but of course one has to ask 80% of what). I taught my seminar on Demystifying Large Language Models again, which as before has been a great opportunity to read and learn the things I wouldn’t have time for otherwise. This iteration I had 5 students taking the class for credit plus several visitors, and we had some excellent insightful discussions and presentations and final papers. I really love teaching! (though by the end of the semester I am always tired and a little upset with past-me for setting me up to do so much work!)

Mentoring

As in previous years, I continue to take too many informational interviews, but I find it hard to decline. I had 31 such one-off interviews this year (cf 27 last year), plus regular meetings with one mentee every 2-3 weeks and occasional meetings with two other mentees on an as-needed basis. I also gave career talks at Bogazici University, Penn State, and Queen Mary University in London, and did office hours and mixers at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer. I’m probably forgetting at least one or two others.

I taught my “careers for linguists” semester-long workshop for the fourth time in Spring 2024 at MIT, and then did more of a reading-group variant in Fall 2024 based on student feedback. The idea being that topics are announced weekly and students can come just to parts that are relevant to them (though regardless it was a pretty stable group of students who showed up for all lectures). I’ll continue on this basis in Spring 2025 with something like 3-4 sessions planned and we’ll see where we go from there. We focused on basics and skills for the fall, whereas we’ll do practical application stuff (resumes, interviews) in the spring.

LEXING!

In a combination of Alllll Of The Above, for most of the year I’ve been working on organizing LEXING (Linguists in Industry, Non-profits, and Government), which will meet for the first time at the LSA Annual Meeting in Philly in January 2025, and I hope will become an annual event after that. To crib text from our blurb “LEXING aims to create a space for linguists currently employed outside academia and those who are considering such careers to come together, with the goal of fostering a community of career linguists––embracing newcomers and easing career transition points”. LEXING will feature organized sessions, talks, fishbowls, and a mixer! I will be giving a talk based on my work on protected group bias.

I’ll also be organizing Pop-Up Mentoring and will have some Executive Committee responsibilities so it’ll be a busy LSA, as always. Advocating for “taking a non-academic job”≠”leaving the linguistics community” has been on my mind for years and I hope this is the start of making a meaningful space for this underrepresented group.

Travel

Travel is closely tied to work and academia so here goes. Other than my many work trips across coasts, I had 4 invited talks in the summer and fall. The first two, which I combined to one big trip, were at SIGMOD and NAACL, in Chile and Mexico respectively. It was my first time in the Southern Hemisphere, South America, and Central America. Mexico City was an unexpected delight! I visited the Museum of Anthropology twice and went to Teotihuacan but there was so much more to do. I can’t wait to be able to go again! In addition, I gave an invited talk together with my former intern and AIML Scholar/mentee Hadas Orgad at an Apple-organized academia/industry collaborative workshop, which was great but also right after the former two conferences, which made for a very busy June.

In September, I participated in a Grace Hopper panel on The Intersection of AI and Gender: Safety issues in LLMs with senior leaders from my org and both the panel and the entire conference were a real highlight of the year. It was my first Grace Hopper but I hope not my last!

Separately from all the above, in March I was chosen to give a talk at a large Apple-internal conference that I can’t say much more about, but it was A Big Deal and a great honor (and also meant another trip to the Other Coast), and probably didn’t hurt for all that other career advancement stuff I was doing this year.

Also! In April, I traveled down to Dallas, TX to experience the solar eclipse. Wow, was it worth the very long one-day trip. Totality is indescribable!

I still haven’t been to Israel (I usually go over the December holidays, but not last year because of Oct 7 and not this year either); we decided again it wasn’t a good idea for us to travel home what with the war and missiles and all. So instead the family converged on Las Vegas in December for a few days of shows and day trips. This included the Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree national forest, the Hoover Dam, and Red Rock Canyon. I really love the desert landscape.

Personal

My health has continued to be good, thankfully. I haven’t been sick at all in 2024. The ICL surgery I had in late 2023 was very successful. My one-year checkup still showed 20/20 vision! I’m thinking of Invisalign for 2025, and probably getting my wisdom teeth removed. Every dentist I’ve ever been to has told me they should go. I’ve gone as far as getting a consult but then didn’t follow through; it’s a big commitment, but maybe it’s time.

My blender continues to be a high-use item for smoothies, and my combination oven/air fryer is still a favorite. I haven’t cooked nearly as much this year compared to previous ones; being super busy and working west coast hours have meant less free time, and cooking is always one of the first things to go when I get busy. But I at least try to order healthy foods and not junk. I also continue to have home cleaning people come by every ~3 weeks and it’s sooo nice. And my cats continue to be the best little dudes.

On the home improvement front, I had to replace my heater and my hot water tank (separately, and of course the hot water heater started leaking and died the week of Thanksgiving). These were not unpredictable expenses in that both were past end of life and long out of warranty, but still they were quite large expenses. I’m hoping it gives me so peace and quiet for a long time now.

Fun

A while back I decided to try to go to one cultural event per month – a movie, show, musical, etc. This is what I can remember/find in my calendar for the year:

They aren’t actually equally distributed per month but I’m getting there if we count by year.

Finally, I read 74 books this year through the Libby App (cf 91 and 89 in 2023 and 2022 respectively). Some favorites (in no particular order):

I’m always open to recommendations!

 

A final note

In many ways, it has now been October 7th, 2023 for over 64 weeks. Last year, I ended my post with the words “I can only hope that 2024 is better, because I don’t even want to imagine what it would mean if it got worse.” But of course things haven’t gotten any better. The political climate both in Israel and in the US are not encouraging in the least. I have sadly parted ways with some people who I used to consider friends over words or actions or occasionally inaction. But I do my best to remain hopeful and try to make positive changes, insignificant as they may be, as small acts of resistence. I can’t hope to offset global events with my actions, but I do my best where I can.