We’ve had a damp middle of the week in Tokyo, and as I plotted the most underground routes between meetings I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an excellent talk by Perla Maiolino on incorporating embodied intelligence into robots at the University of Tokyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGLc7r3uL6M

Next was a great talk by Kenji Doya on neural circuits for prediction and action at the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMshJIIu1MA

Next was an interesting talk by Kalanit Grill-Spector on modeling visual perception with spatially-aware deep artificial neural networks at #CCN2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR97JscmNzE

Next was a slate of talks from the ECGI 2026 Global Corporate Governance Colloquium:

Dorothy Lund - proxy voting choice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq3phUss-pM

Qi Wang - how shareholder voice shapes board agendas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNgqHNu0AGo

Kobi Kastiel - expected effects of weakened non-controlling shareholder rights http://youtube.com/watch?v=yGk4WFhKmL4

Lauren Hu-Hsin Lin - Blackrock’s voting adherence to corporate CCP committee preferences - highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCa5V6-K6E 

Alminas Žaldokas - effects of firm Russia pullouts after their invasion of Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6dPhjcgd_A

Last was “Processes of Economic Informalization” by Ilona Steiler. This is an illuminating qualitative dive into informal labor in Tanzania, showing the challenge with even defining that concept as a clear category and the unintuitive challenges in attempting to stringently formalize much of that work. Steiler does an impressive job combining interviews and other sociological data to provide a deep perspective of many types of workers in this space, the importance of valuing this labor, and the development of "informal" careers. I do wish there was more quantitative data not just on Tanzania but more widely to connect these micro observations to broader trends, however. Highly recommend https://www.routledge.com/Processes-of-Economic-Informalization-Reconfigurations-of-Law-Labour-and-the-State/Steiler/p/book/9781032277929