#AcademicRunPlaylist - 2/20/24

I was downtown for some meetings today, and accompanying my commute were some nice talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Prabhash Ranjan on international investment, bilateral investment treaties, and India's COVID response at the Campus Law Centre, Faculty Of Law, University of Delhi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuafQSKj-S0

Next was a good pair of talks by Samuel Holt and Max Ruiz (control unit on LLMs for code generation) and Tennison Liu and Nicolás Astorga Rocha (LLMs for improving Bayesian optimization) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFvr1o7EzQY

Next was a wide-ranging conversation with Hanns Ullrich on the history and roots of EU competition law post-WW2 on Oles Andriychuk's Digital Markets Research Hub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wzza0m8rJM

Next was an interesting talk by Cansu Canca on reshaping the role of IRBs for AI research at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DE8L27WBvQ

Next was an incredible panel on the current legal assault on the NLRB at the Burnes Center for Social Change with Seth Harris, Charlotte Garden, Michael Z. Green, and Jeffrey Hirsch. This discussion clearly explains the current raft of cases pending in higher US courts that have implications for the NLRB and labor rights more broadly, in addition to getting into broader legal trends in the US. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQTPkeiSKs

Next was an excellent talk by Oliver Haimson on trans technologies at the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm9cJD3aIk4

Next was an amazing talk by Chinmayi Sharma on the need for a Hippocratic oath for AI developers at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Sharma convincingly lays out the case for professional certification and standards for individual commercial AI developers and draws parallels to certifications in fields like medicine and accounting. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HHTvPoA3OY

Next was an intriguing talk by Gerd Gigerenzer on the rationality of heuristics at the Santa Fe Institute. This talk starts off well, but you will know when it goes off the rails and it's time to move on to the next talk 😢 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGIoFxBiu78

Last was a fantastic discussion with Tim Wu on a modern approach to antitrust enforcement at the New York University School of Law. Wu examines some of the key ideas from his book on the issue with large companies, and has some frank self-assessment of his work on antitrust during the Obama administration. While this talk is from February 2020 (there's an extremely unfortunate comment by the moderator that aged horribly) it's still quite relevant. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLi35Kbfi40