#AcademicRunPlaylist - 8/21/25

Author

Ben Waber
August 21, 2025

A picture of, from the left, a Japanese woman, me, a Japanese man, and a Japanese woman smiling at the camera in front of a brick wall with a waist high tan wooden cabinet running in front of it. The red and white PayPay logo is somewhat obscured by the Japanese man.

It was my last two days in Tokyo ☹️, but I really enjoyed spending yesterday with Hitomi Inagaki, Akihiko Nagase, and Rina Kumagai at PayPay Corporation and today with a number of other collaborators across the city. I also listened to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Thomas Serre on the links between AI and neuroscience at MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHr9W_Fss44

Next was a nice conversation with Ludovic Phalippou on the recent growth of private markets at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbQbvWtxAJQ

Last was "Connecting Dots" by Joshua Miele. If you like memoirs that sprinkle in some details about fascinating, novel, and important technology, this is the book for you. Miele spends most of the time recounting his life in this book, with his blindness and its influence running through the narrative. I was more interested in his insights into accessibility, and while there's a bit of that here it's mostly a sideshow. It's still a very engaging book, I just wish more of his work was detailed here https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joshua-a-miele/connecting-dots/9780306832789/?lens=grand-central-publishing