Jekyll2026-06-09T16:44:51+00:00https://wai-org.com/feed.xmlWAIWAI is a student-led organization formed by PhD students in the University of Washington CS NLP group, incubating open-source projects and research.WAIWelcome to the WAI blog2026-05-11T00:00:00+00:002026-05-11T00:00:00+00:00https://wai-org.com/blog/welcome-to-the-wai-blogThis is the first post on the WAI blog. We started WAI to incubate open-source projects and research coming out of the University of Washington CS NLP group,^[WAI is run entirely by PhD students. If you’d like to get involved, reach out — we’re always looking for collaborators.] and this blog is where we’ll share what we learn along the way.

This post doubles as a quick tour of how posts are written and rendered, so you can see the features available to you before writing your own.

Sidenotes

The signature feature of this theme is Tufte-style sidenotes. Any Markdown footnote becomes a numbered note in the margin on wide screens, and collapses inline on narrow screens.^[Like this one. Sidenotes are great for citations, asides, and definitions that would otherwise interrupt the flow of the main text.] They keep references close to where they’re mentioned without breaking your reading.

You can also cite work inline the same way.^[Vaswani, A. et al. “Attention Is All You Need.” NeurIPS, 2017.] Write a footnote and it becomes a margin note automatically.

Math

Inline math works with single dollar signs: the loss is $\mathcal{L}(\theta)$. Display math is rendered with KaTeX:

\[\mathcal{L}(\theta) = -\frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^{N} \log p_\theta(y_i \mid x_i)\]

Set math: true in a post’s front matter to load KaTeX on that page.

Code

Code blocks are styled for readability, with inline code too:

def softmax(x):
    x = x - x.max(axis=-1, keepdims=True)
    e = np.exp(x)
    return e / e.sum(axis=-1, keepdims=True)

Lists and quotes

  • Open-source projects and tools
  • Research write-ups and notes
  • Project updates from the lab

We believe science is better when it is shared.

Writing your own post

Add a Markdown file to _posts/ named YYYY-MM-DD-title.md, include the front matter above, and push to main. GitHub Actions builds the site with Pandoc and deploys it. That’s it.

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