#AcademicRunPlaylist - 7/7/24

The kids asked to go to the local Japanese market, so of course I obliged! Accompanying the excellent food options were some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Charles Yang on learning, satisficing, and LLMs at UQAM | Université du Québec à Montréal. Yang demonstrates fascinating principles of language and language learning around exceptions and finding "good enough" solutions, then shows how LLMs still aren't great at these - throwing cold water onto the idea that language modeling is "solved." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xk7giVdRd4

Next was a wide-ranging talk by Alice Krozer on inequality in the 21st century at the Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMRS8nkml8g

Next was a nice talk by Mikhail (Misha) Belkin on the puzzle of dimensionality and features learning in deep learning and LLMs at UQAM (the meat of the talk starts at around 14 minutes) https://youtu.be/BU8B21CuGbE?si=YoXZ_8Ah7R1Rhxa8&t=854

Next was a thought-provoking talk by Ulrike Malmendier on the long-term effects of economic crisis experiences at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge. I'm not sure about the methodology of the computer vision portion of this talk, but the first half is solid and important https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrtWQ5yhVaE

Next was an interesting talk by Judit Gervain on how people learn language from infancy to adulthood at UQAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1UKVDvvcgA

Next was an excellent talk by Oriana Bandiera on the organization of labor and economic development at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLiMEaEpuMA

Last was a sweeping talk by Bill Emmott on the past, present, and future of globalization at the University of Tokyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q9JdncMJtA