#AcademicRunPlaylist - 3/15/24

It was a bit rainy today (pic is from earlier in the week), but I was still able to listen to a bunch of talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Linda Hill with case studies of effective organizational leadership at the UC San Diego Design Lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nymuU1j0o2c&t=3s

Next was an intriguing talk by Jugal Garg on allocating resources to maximize fairness and minimize envy at the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uGRBxT1hMI&t=1s

Next was a short talk by Rehema Baguma on the potential harms of LLMs in Africa at the Makerere AI Lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0D17S5yrcw

Next was an intriguing talk by Kate Saenko on using LLMs for visual understanding at the MIT Embodied Intelligence seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbVYUnr_1Q0

Next was a great talk by Yilun Du on improving large multimodal models through compositional generation. The method Du presents is elegant, and seems to have high potential to improve single models. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw3pEpXY468

Next was an excellent discussion on the importance of some economic turbulence for productivity improvement on The Productivity Institute podcast with John Van Reenen and Javier Miranda. This conversation touches on the growing power of large firms and their impact on productivity and how we could encourage further dynamism in this environment https://pod.co/productivity-puzzles/business-dynamism-is-turbulence-good-for-productivity

Next was an engaging panel on technology and the future of work at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business with Erik Brynjolfsson, Roy E. Bahat, and Susan Athey. This is from 2019, but it's still instructive to reflect given the current environment. Also Frida Polli makes an appearance in the Q&A! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juV7zGBhO2w

Last was a fascinating paper by Marco Molteni on bank competition, over-branching, and branch failures during the Great Depression in Italy in the Economic History Review. FYI I used Adobe's automated reading function to listen to this (passable, but probably not for papers with more math than this) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ehr.13340