#AcademicRunPlaylist - 5/22/25

It was pretty gross out today (pic is from earlier in the week), but while going a bit stir crazy inside I still listened to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Shiva Rajgopal on a wishlist for corporate financial reporting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V36S4YhcYcA

Next was an interesting talk by Xiao Zhang the symbiosis of generative vision language models and representation learning at Ai2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFNDO5AjSS4

Last was "Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test" by Marlene Zuk. This book is an extremely engaging look into the interaction between genetics and the environment in the animal kingdom, getting into fundamental questions about evolution and the definition of intelligence (spoiler: it's impossible to have a single definition). Many of the examples here will be familiar to those who've read up on work in anthropology or animal cognition, but Zuk presents these cases with such an enjoyable writing style that you won't want to skip them. Highly recommend https://wwnorton.com/books/dancing-cockatoos-and-the-dead-man-test