A little belated but…

What a great first week!

I spent the first week conducting an exploratory literature review and brainstorming ideas for our application. It was ultimately somewhat light work but I learned a lot and we discussed a lot of interesting ideas, I am sure the project will begin to pick up in future weeks.

We have finally settled on our exact plan — using LLMs to support counterspeakers online, who post responses to hateful and dangerous speech. Our work will begin with a focus group study to test the initial ideas we’ve drawn from the literature and ensure we are developing in a direction that will be useful. The basic premise is that people who engage in counterspeach are often overtaxed both in terms of labor and emotional strain, but this is likely not a domain where unsupervised chatbots responding to messages would be appropriate given the sensitivity and nuance of the topic. For this reason we are considering tools that leverage LLMs to help reduce the effort in responding to hateful messages by providing users with drafts or help in editing.

In addition to the work I have been getting used to the lab culture here and I absolutely love it. Every lunch everyone gathers together to eat, with many of us often going out to pick up a sandwich or some such thing at one of the local shops. So far it has been a very relaxed and friendly environment and I am enjoying all the social opportunities with my colleagues.

On Friday they treated us to Weißwurstfrühstück, a classic Bavarian breakfast involving sausage and pretzels, though I did not get to fully appreciate it as a vegetarian what I did get to eat was still quite tasty and it was fun seeing the cultural traditions of the area.

I was so exhausted after the week of work I did not get to doing the blog post on time, but I can now speak a little on my experience exploring Munich which I got to do on the weekend. The city is so green and fun to walk around, with many lovely parks including a long forested walk along the river that runs through the city. Aurora and I walked until our feet gave out. Though we have been informed that there can be a bit of xenophobia in this area and some people might react poorly to us speaking English, we have been greeted with nothing but kindness. On Sunday as we were having breakfast outside of a cafe it started raining and a local woman joined us at our table (which had an umbrella). She was incredibly welcoming and gave us all kinds of suggestions of things we might enjoy around the city.

I have been working on my German on Duo Lingo and have finally worked up the courage to attempt to order things in German, though people still often default to responding in English rather quickly, I am improving bit by bit.