#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/18/24

It was another lovely day, and luckily I was able to get out and listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Claudia von Bastian on the role of capacity and efficiency in cognitive training and transfer effects, including data from Counter Strike players (!) at the Psychonomic Society (PSoc) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPZBLg3Pg_k

Next was an engaging conversation with Rajesh P. N. Rao on predictive coding, brain-computer interfaces, and more on the Brain Inspired podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmxQgQmY9js

Next was an amazing talk by Mark McDaniel on individual differences in concept learning at PSoc. McDaniel demonstrates that individuals vary in using abstraction or exemplar learning, with profound implications for teaching style, course structure, and learning outcomes. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXvyoscgPhg

Next was a whirlwind review of 2024 in corporate governance news w/Ann Lipton and Michael Levin on the Shareholder Primacy podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG7Fw38N9aw

Next was an important PSoc symposium on seeing race in cognitive psychology with talks by Mahzarin Banaji (mental representation of race), Phillip Goff (predicting bad policing), David Amodio (dehumanization of Black ppl under economic stress), and Sarah Gaither (frameworks for ambiguous face categorization). Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3nv6hh_DS4

Next was an excellent talk by Sean Welleck on inference-time meta-generation algorithms for LLMs at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Welleck shows how to achieve better accuracy through a novel meta-generation algorithm, deriving limits on accuracy levels and how this method can lead to smaller models outperforming larger ones when given the same compute budget. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqOBYOx3sHE

Next was an intriguing talk by Girish Chowdhary on building more autonomous robotic systems at Stanford University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWw7wDOsc4c

Next was a compelling PSoc symposium with Richard Prather (reconstructing human cognition by abandoning cognitive universals), Belem López (beyond white monolingual hegemony), Tissyana Camacho, Ph.D. (increasing minoritized representation), and Audrey Duarte (racial disparities in sleep quality and memory) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGveYpZoAO4

Next was an interesting talk by Arsen Vasilyan on testing noise assumptions of learning algorithms at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyTXQP9K25Y

Last was a rapid-fire talk by Jeremy Wolfe on why people look but fail to see at PSoc. Wolfe takes us on a raucous tour of human visual errors and what underlies these issues. Highly recommend https://youtu.be/kX0vNN9iAi8?si=B92P3X-TVMIluYOl&t=984