#AcademicRunPlaylist - 4/11/24

Clearly spring is in the air for turkeys, and while enjoying the seasonal wildlife activity I was also able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the first day of the #COMIPinDigiMarkts2022 conference at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law. This was a packed day, and particularly noteworthy for me was a pre-generative AI talk by Pamela Samuelson on interfaces and interoperability after Google v. Oracle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD4O-7rKVd8

Next was an intriguing talk by Philipp Strack on privacy preserving models at the CEPR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOX7pXMx_d8

Next was a great talk by Tobias Klein on the importance of user-generated data for search result quality using a novel experiment at the Toulouse School of Economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWR54cMTVBs&t=9s

Next was an engaging panel on the rise and decline of VC in China at the Peterson Institute for International Economics with Josh Lerner and Rui Ma. There's good insight on the arc of the Chinese market here and reasons for the VC slowdown there, although no one touched the likely big role of recent mostly random government detention of business leaders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF2LaL4bWuY

Next was an important talk by Kerry McInerney and Eleanor Drage on why technology needs feminism at Stanford HAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ypzMlRnDmQ

Next was an excellent talk by Tara Watson on the economic effects of immigration to the US at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. Watson gives a sweeping summary of the overwhelming evidence that immigrants are a huge positive to the economy, even contributing more to government coffers than American-born people. She ends by laying out the case for significantly ramping up legal immigration avenues in the US. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNsZ8TGvi5E

Last was a fascinating conversation with Laura Gwilliams on Neuropixels - tiny needles that she puts into parts of patient's brains as they're about to be removed in surgery to study language-related neuronal activity at unprecedented scale (!) on the Stanford Psychology Podcast https://www.stanfordpsychologypodcast.com/episodes/episode/7b3ed1ae/130-laura-gwilliams-the-needles-that-unraveled-the-brains-language-and-what-we-can-learn-from-them