#AcademicRunPlaylist - 2/23/24

I had a nice Friday working from home with this guy, made that much better by nice talks from my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a compelling talk by Jacob Andreas on combining LLMs with symbolic AI for robotics at MIT. The idea here seems promising - using LLMs to instantiate priors on symbolic models for tasks. As Andreas says, these models are likely to be wrong a decent amount of the time, but since LLMs dramatically reduce the search space they help make model learning tractable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TrKARhF5cI

Next was an intriguing talk by Yihan Wang on adversarial attacks for different LLM detection algorithms at the USC Information Sciences Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx1T9lyNDh0

Next was a wide-ranging conversation with Luigi Zingales on the nature of corporate finance, corporate frauds and the need for whistleblower programs, innovation and regulation, and more at the Indian School of Business https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW82u0tp2ZE

Next was an excellent talk by Ignacio Cofone on harm and power in the information economy at the Oxford Internet Institute. Cofone provides good perspective on why current laws and regulations fail to protect against digital harms and proposes possible responses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtcOuFuFZs

Next was an informative talk by Martin Spindler on using machine learning to investigate US gender wage gap heterogeneity at the Royal Statistical Society https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuFwbeDenTo

Next was a fascinating talk by Pietro Valdastri on soft robotics for early detection and treatment of cancer at the GRASP Lab. If you ever wondered if an episode of Future could inspire the development of a colonoscopy robot, now you have your answer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UW4YmPvGiA

Last were two talks from the National Bureau of Economic Research's Economic Fluctuations and Growth symposium by Alessandra Peter (firm size and productivity in Uganda) and Christian Moser (skill/job matching and country GDP relationship). Peter's discussant Claudia Macaluso goes the extra mile by reaching out to actual door manufacturers in Uganda and Maine to learn more about how these companies function, while Moser's discussant Christopher Tonetti rightly calls out the usage of the word "meritocracy" in this paper and offers other constructive feedback

Peter's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJGTFoXjPqY
Moser's talk: https://www.youtube.com/live/cpnxaC5Hm9A?si=f5R3vxsZ_Fpwz6Yl&t=10056