#AcademicRunPlaylist - 3/20/35

THIS IS NOT A DRILL - THERE IS A JAPANESE VENDING MACHINE ON THE FIRST FLOOR OF THE MIT Schwarzman College of Computing!!! Granted the prices are literally 2.5x what they are in Japan, and after getting some drinks before our insane tariffs kick in I was able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Jehanzeb Mirza on using LLMs to implicitly optimize VLMs at the MIT Embodied Intelligence Seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ25NmpArYo

Next was an excellent talk by Rob Merges on the basic structure of IP rights at the Cambridge Faculty of Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c7jd3cPrdo

Next was a short talk by 汪黎明 (Liming Wang) on understanding how diffusion models can learn disentangled representations at the MIT Embodied Intelligence Seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls1oQed53M0

Next was a slate of talks at the GRASP Lab by Ahmad Amine (predictive control models for iterative tasks), Erica Pauline Santos (robots for the moon!), and Darshan Thaker (frequency sampling for diffusion-based image restoration) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZSVINx_eTY

Next was a compelling talk by Michela Giorcelli on the diffusion of soft technologies during and after WWII at the LSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWCqhE0BpA0

Last was "How the World Made the West" by Josephine Quinn. For those who want to understand the roots of modern European powers and what is now called the "West," this book is an engaging tour through the tight millennia-spanning relations between present day Europe, Africa, and Asia. Quinn shows how even cultures typically viewed as emblematic of the ancient West - namely Greece and Rome - were successor states of other empires that spanned vast geographies. Beyond that, they were embedded within dense cultural, technological, and political ties that bound their developments inextricably to states far afield. Highly recommend https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736806/how-the-world-made-the-west-by-josephine-quinn/