#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/20/24

Author

Ben Waber
October 20, 2024

A picture of me looking up at a large green Chihuly sculpture shaped like a 10 meter tall pine/palm tree in a large granite-lined atrium with a partially glass wall and an exposed staircase on the far side. There's a grey circle next to me where I erased part of the image. I'm a bald, middle-aged white man with a red beard wearing a blue t-shirt and brown shorts

After voting (for those of you who are US citizens make sure to do your part!) I headed to the MFA with the family. Amidst all the shuttling around today I was also able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a wide-ranging talk by Danqi Chen on the practicalities of effectively training LLMs at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh5GrLobjXU

Next was an interesting talk by Mahi Shafiullah on using various transformer-based models for robotics at the MIT Embodied Intelligence seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZXfQW8hU4Y

Last was a thought-provoking talk by Surbhi Goel on handling adversarial/out of distribution data in sequential prediction tasks at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7ZjvsrJd8