#AcademicRunPlaylist - 3/13/24

It was a beautiful spring-like day (and apparently it'll be even better tomorrow!), which made a lovely accompaniment to my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the second day of Hitotsubashi University's legal systems and AI event. There was lots of work here showing good results using LLMs to annotate law cases, and I particularly liked the final talk by Felix Steffek and Måns Magnusson on the Cambridge law corpus. FYI the audio switches between Japanese and English briefly on both recordings, but it eventually goes back to the original language.

English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAaC8TMfehk
Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15UAzmkcGZ4

Next was a great talk by Aaron Sojourner on how changes to NDA laws influence Glassdoor activity at the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (MaCCI). This is pretty strong evidence that stricter laws governing employee NDAs help with public disclosure of bad behavior https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIK-WC4QJYk

Next was an informative conversation with James An on the distinction between direct and derivative shareholder claims on the Business Scholarship Podcast. An provides clear grounding in this area and how this distinction should evolve to provide better outcomes and clearer guidance. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6fz5HhFkg4

Next was an excellent talk by Yutong Bai on building large vision models without any linguistic data at the GRASP Lab. I'd like the evaluation to be a bit more systematic, but this is very impressive work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xlo1PbJ1lE

Next was an amazing talk by Evgenii Fadeev on the meaning of patent citations at MaCCI. Economists treating patent citations as evidence of knowledge spillovers is one of my pet peeves, as subjectively I've seen so little evidence of this in my career. Fadeev takes an absolute hammer to this practice, showing that in fact patents are much more representative of business relationships between firms and past intentional knowledge flows. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMh1aT6AZyI

Next was an interesting talk by Hyejin Youn on measuring the nested nature of employee skills at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems - NICO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RGkPp-pRI4

Next was a wide-ranging talk by Nicholas Stern on policies and institutions to facilitate a transition to a green economy at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJb6rogV4i0

Last was a nice talk by Dorsa Sadigh on using large pre-trained models for robotics tasks and how to guide data collection at Stanford University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zggAEHm8dXc