👋🏼 Hello, I'm Adam Visokay

I am a PhD student studying at the University of Washington, advised by Professor Tyler McCormick. I am also an affiliated student with the Max Planck Institute in Germany. My research explores how to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to study social phenomena, typically motivated by questions in public health, economics, and sociology. I am particularly interested in improving the interpretability and transparency of language models, and how to perform valid statistical inference using predictions from black box algorithms. My most recent work is featured in EMNLP and COLM.

🎓 Education

2023-present - PhD, University of Washington, Sociology
2024 - MA, University of Washington, Sociology
2017 - MA, Syracuse University, Economics
2016 - BA, University of Virginia, Economics & History

🔬 Experience

2023-present - Graduate Research Assistant, University of Washington, Seattle
2022-2023 Researcher, University of Washington CSSS, Seattle
2021-Summer - Research Assistant, Sciences Po, Paris (Remote COVID)

📰 News

21 April 2025 - 🧑‍🏫 Gave a guest lecture on "Artificial Intelligence" for SOC 270 Social Problems at the University of Washington, Seattle. [Slides].:
18 April 2025 - 🧑‍🏫 Presented my research on Inference with Predicted Data at a Tech Talk for Elder Research in Arlington, VA. [Slides].:
12 April 2025 - 🧑‍🏫 Presented my research on mortality estimation with LLMs in the "Machine Learning Approaches in Mortality Research" session at PAA 2025 in Washington, D.C. [Slides].:
12 April 2025 - 🧑‍🏫 Presented my research on obesity measurement in the "Obesity, Behavior, and Novel Weight-Loss Medications" session at PAA 2025 in Washington, D.C. [Slides].:
17 Mar 2025 - 🇩🇪 Traveled to Rostock for the second workshop on open science at [MPIDR].:
03 Dec 2024 - 🧑‍⚖️ Report on Legal Financial Obligations in Washington’s Courts is published. [link]:
04 Dec 2024 - 🇩🇪 Presenting my research at the 2024 Annual Academy at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. [Slides]:
19 Nov 2024 - 📜 My new project BMI predicts adiposity, but not well enough to learn about obesity is accepted as an oral presentation for PAA 2025 in Washington D.C. April 10-13 2025.:
12 Nov 2024 - 🎙 Invited talk at the UW Data Science Seminar in Seattle, WA [Slides, Video]:
06 Nov 2024 - 🎙 Invited talk at the UW Computational Demography Working Group in Seattle, WA [Slides]:
05 Nov 2024 - 🎙 Invited talk at the Fred Hutchinson Deep Learning Affinity Group in Seattle, WA [Slides]:
07 Oct 2024 - 🧑‍🏫 Poster presentation at the first-ever Conference on Language Models (COLM🦙) in Philadelphia, PA [Poster]:
25 Sep 2024 - 🎒 Started Year 2 of my Ph.D. at UW!:
09 Sep 2024 - 📊 Co-instructed this year's Summer Math Camp for incoming social science Ph.D. students for the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences at UW [Course Materials]:
15 Aug 2024 - 🎒 Admitted as an affiliated student at the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS).:
31 Jul 2024 - 🗳️ Elected to a one year term as President of my department's Graduate Student Association for the 2024-2025 academic year.:
10 Jul 2024 - 📜 My paper about post-prediction inference for cause of death estimation is accepted to COLM 2024! [Paper]:
10 Jul 2024 - 🎙 Invited talk at the US Census Bureau for the xD team [Slides]:
08 Jun 2024 - 🎓 I received my M.A. in Sociology [Slide]:
20 May 2024 - 🏆 Ph.D. Milestone 1/n - I successfully defended my M.A. Thesis!:
16 May 2024 - 🧑‍🏫 Poster presentation at the 25th Anniversary Conference for UW CSSS. [Poster]:
01 May 2024 - 🧑‍🏫 Our poster on sociodemographic bias in Google Street View is presented at the UC Berkeley Data Science Discovery Symposium. [Poster]:
01 Mar 2024 - 🧑‍⚖️ Started my new position doing applied NLP work for Washington State Courts Washington Courts (WSCCR).:
07 Oct 2023 - 📜 My paper about using GPT-4 to annotate Federal Reserve documents is officially accepted to EMNLP Findings 2023! [Paper]:
27 Sep 2023 - 🎒 Started Year 1 of my Ph.D. at UW!: