#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/14/25

After teaching a virtual class for MIT TLP I had a bunch of meetings, and in between I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an excellent talk by Florian Ederer on the unintuitive effects of "killer" tech acquisitions at the WEFI Workshop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMXG7ksFDKc

Next was a compelling talk by Peter Baile Chen on optimizing LLM retrieval and reasoning at Ai2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5pm49diMYA

Next was an amazing talk by Davon Norris on credit, discrimination, and the unfair nature of algorithmic expansion at University of California, Berkeley. Norris meticulously demonstrates how algorithmic credit scoring systems and their proponents have co-opted terminology and framings originally meant to promote fairness and the exclusion of racist criteria without necessarily making improvements. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwra13ST1Bk

Next was an interesting talk by Katherine Coffman on how stereotypes can impair idea sharing and job applications at The Program on Negotiation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzXmhYJ020s

Next was an engaging conversation with Kunle Olukotun on dataflow computing for large models on the TWIML podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvYkYiPc-NQ

Next was a nice talk by Adithya Pratapa on augmenting language models with text compression at Ai2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9jeyzQXmVk

Next was an important talk by Jacqueline Jones on the struggles of Boston's Black workers in the Civil War era at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX2YayEdXQM

Next was an interesting talk by Sumeet Batra on representations for robot learning at Ai2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ_lVjnVPXY

Last was "Historiography" by Ernst Breisach. This book methodically works through Western historiography, starting in Greece and ending in the late 20th century. Breisach reviews the introduction of new methods in history, how social context continually alters how historians interpret the past, and contrasts different schools. I wish the view would've been expanded to non-Western approaches, and the choice to organize the book chronologically rather than by event ("The Ever Changing Past" does this beautifully for the Civil War), makes it more challenging to contrast methods and goals across time periods. Still, this is an impressive tome on the practice of history. Highly recommend https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo4329369.html