#AcademicRunPlaylist - 4/12/24

The sun finally came out late, which made for an enjoyable backdrop for talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the National Bureau of Economic Research spring organizational economics meeting. The first day was absolutely packed, and I particularly liked the work by Benjamin W. Arold (NLP analysis of collective bargaining agreements), Adam Dearing and Michael Waldman (a powerful talk on harassment and discrimination dynamics), and Daniela Scur (pay transparency and mental health). The standout of day 2 for me was the talk by Jill Grennan, with a mixed methods (!) study on frictions in the patenting process viewed through an employee demographic lens. Highly recommend the whole thing, especially day 1 and Grennan's talk
Day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7GzwJj_1Y4
Day 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIyl4xxJwRM

Next was a great talk by Mishael Joy Barrera on the impact of non-monetary forms of remittances on entrepreneurship development using data from Filipino migrants in Japan at Ateneo de Manila University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyik01MWElM

Next was an intriguing talk by Luca Beurer-Kellner and Marc Fischer on LMQL - a programming language that incorporates LLMs - at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). I remain a bit skeptical of this approach given the fundamental flaws of LLMs, but this is probably the most compelling attempt I've seen at building structure around LLMs to use in a more predictable way in computational tasks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-w8upx6zb4