#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/25/24

Happy first night of Channukah (it's probably some other holiday too)! While enjoying the mostly empty streets I was also able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Alison Gopnik on analogical reasoning in children and AI at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFQIQ6ieN5I

Next was a thought-provoking talk by Konrad Kording on generalization insights from actual cognition at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZC6peooXak

Next was an excellent talk by Tom McCoy on using training data statistics to examine how many LLM generations are exact replicas of the training data at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c9TiKryTtA

Next was an interesting talk by Florent Krzakala on how neural networks learn simple functions at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfDexMWGJno

Next was an informative talk by Sagiri Kitao on navigating demographic aging while aiming for macroeconomic growth in Japan at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), with discussion by Jong Wha Lee and Rohini Somanathan. I was shocked that immigration wasn't discussed until the Q&A, but overall this is a good discussion of Japan's thinking about their demographic challenges https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssy2K_8kFuw

Last was "When Languages Die" by K. David Harrison. As languages are going extinct at an unprecedented rate with the rapidly increasing population in urban centers and the subsequent economic benefits of speaking major languages, understanding what is being lost is especially urgent. This book nicely sketches out the issues here: loss of cultural knowledge, loss of natural world knowledge, and loss of evidence essential for understanding human cognition. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/when-languages-die-9780195372069