#AcademicRunPlaylist - 7/6/24

I had a great Saturday discussing economics and finance with my oldest (seriously), but I was also able to get out a bit and listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a nice talk by Aishwarya Agrawal on multimodal vision-language learning at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-CUeb_7P38

Next was a nice talk by Nina Rismal on feminist and gender studies' critiques of mainstream economics at the Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEkuglEN3dY

Next was an interesting talk by Friedemann Pulvermuller on semantic grounding of concepts and meaning in brain-constrained neural networks at UQAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIkyfEWAflY&t=34s

Next was a great talk by Julie Cogin on modern HR, gender, and management at UNSW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewwQd7ELv34

Next was a compelling talk by Eva Portelance on using neural networks to investigate how people learn language at UQAM. Portelance takes a good approach here - acknowledging that LLMs and other machine learning methods aren't even close to how people learn, she instead uses the to delineate the boundaries of what's possible to learn in different cases and generate plausible hypotheses that can then be followed up by research with people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF0DkkYg1ug

Next was an important talk by Wendy Brown on the implications of the US Supreme Court treating firms like people (note that this is a 2015 talk, yet reads as prophetic given recent decisions) at the London School of Economics and Political Science https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHvGsKXqL8s

Last was an excellent talk by Virginia Valian on language acquisition in children and how it's importantly different than how LLMs work at UQAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmVNctHPPAU