#AcademicRunPlaylist - 8/29/25

Today I mostly had meetings, but I still got to see a bit of the local wildlife while listening to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Dongsuk Jeon on designing hardware solutions for deep neural network training at the Athena AI Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axduuGyhbz8

Next was an interesting talk by Leslie Kaelbling on designing rational robotic systems at the Reinforcement Learning Conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdFNzYNqw_o

Next was "No Country For Old Age" by Mischa Honeck. This book primarily concerns itself with messaging around the importance of youth and rejuvenation in the US, and how this culture was fomented from early in US history and was subsequently accelerated through successive periods. This is a very sociological work, with little in the way of quantitative analysis or perspective. A bigger omission is the strange choice to omit any examination of the lives of actual old people - how did changes in life expectancy and elder care interact with these cultural norms? Instead, Honeck decides to review marketing material and political statements on the topic of youth. This is fine, but feels like a missed opportunity https://uncpress.org/9781469680972/no-country-for-old-age/

Last was "Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Feldman Barrett provides a good intro to how the brain functions in an accessible style. It's short and to the point, which is nice but limited in how much you'll learn if you already know the basics. As with her other books, Feldman Barrett strays into areas she's not clearly qualified to opine on, as one should probably expect in a book that is prominently endorsed by Daniel Pink. If you zip through those parts it's a good book https://www.harpercollins.com/products/seven-and-a-half-lessons-about-the-brain-lisa-feldman-barrett