#AcademicRunPlaylist - 9/7/24

It was a nice early fall day in Boston, which made for an enjoyable run while I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the Weakly Supervised Computer Vision workshop at Deep Learning Indaba, with noteworthy talks by Pierluigi Zama Ramirez (neural processing of 3D neural fields) and Daniel Ajisafe (learning human body pose from mirror videos) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEvVWnLMEso

Next was a great talk by Song Han on designing efficient visual language models at #CVPR2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lirjgIgngUE

Next was a wide-ranging talk by Timnit Gebru on the many harms inflicted by computer vision systems, along with some compelling examples of how and when to build ethical and effective systems, at the African Computer Vision Summer School. Gebru's points around the importance of challenging whether or not a system should even be built are especially compelling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7sovu3nBRg

Last was "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee" by David Treuer. This moving and insightful and deeply researched book provides a holistic perspective on the reality of modern Native Americans. Combining historical research, qualitative interviews, and some quantitative methods in the later sections, one gets a sense of the continuing evolution of this essential part of American society.

There is still decent space given to level set on the past, covering Native American history prior to colonization and prior to 1890. After this section Treuer goes through detailed accounts of the shameful and fraught interactions between tribes and the US government, highlighting some successful negotiations and others that ended with further appropriation of native lands. There are brief glimpses of more enlightened policy makers, with some laws and organizational decisions that continue to reverberate today.

The last few parts of the book are nothing short of stunning. The heartfelt study of the activist period of the 60s and 70s was profound, and the legal challenges that led to some tribes embracing gaming and further sovereign rights was illuminating. The sober analysis of the economic challenges many Native Americans face is also contrasted with some incredible success stories. Those success stories leave one wanting a full economic analysis of their underlying causes, but given Treuer's academic background it's probably best that he just set the table here for other scholars.

Especially if you're an American like myself, you'd be hard pressed not to find yourself moved and motivated by this book. Highly recommend.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316457/the-heartbeat-of-wounded-knee-by-david-treuer/