#AcademicRunPlaylist - 5/7/24

It was a gorgeous day in Boston, but since I didn't have a ton of time I did a short run at a much faster clip than normal. I hated it, but hopefully my longer distance time will improve, at least I was still able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a fantastic talk by Shubha Ghosh on licensing intellectual property and the dissemination of technology at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. This is one of the best talks I've ever heard on what patents actually mean for businesses and how they emerge from organizational choices. Ghosh also discusses possible reforms to the IP law system. Highly recommend (especially for economists who use patent data) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyndmqAzJ3w

Next was an interesting talk by Yulia Tsvetkov on measuring LLM biases at the Carnegie Mellon University - School of Computer Science - Language Technologies Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MasM1dHcySs

Next was a great talk by Catie Cuan on teaching robots how to dance (!) at the Maryland Robotics Center https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4dLsZegF_k

Next was an engaging panel on developing Africa's AI ecosystem at TechCabal with Zain Verjee, Bitange Ndemo, and Tomiwa Aladekomo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDkfEYV0uFU

Next was an excellent panel on digital markets in east and southeast Asia on the Digital Markets Research Hub with Jonathan Galloway, Sandra Marco Colino, and Igor Szpotakowski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKQzElDoxKo

Next was an intriguing talk by Thomas Berrueta on building transparent and reliable embodied RL agents at the Maryland Robotics Center https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V22c-ao_FEA

Next was an important pair of talks at the Boston Study Group by Margareta Matache (Roma rights in the global context) and Abdarahman Wone (Dalit and Haratine parallels). Matache's talk in particular is a stirring dive into Roma rights and history, with a clear indictment of the EU's failings in this area. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VipwGngBpFQ

Last was a fascinating talk by Alex Csiszar on the history of quantifying scientific output at the Network Science Institute. Csiszar examines the 19th century and early 20th century efforts here, demonstrating the incredibly recent focus on citations as a measure of quality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLn2cUREjyw