#AcademicRunPlaylist - 9/9/24

The weather continues to be great in Boston, and while snacking on some of the now ripe autumn olives on a walk I was able to catch some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First were a pair of talks by Siwei Lyu (deepfake detection in the real world) and Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan (uncovering and addressing biases in diffusion models) at the #CVPR2024 workshop on fair, data-efficient, and trusted computer vision https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EZaWcqqlmo

Next was the 3rd explainable AI for computer vision workshop at CVPR. I particularly liked the talks by Bernt Schiele (inherent interpretability for deep learning in computer vision) and Tim Miller (human-centered counterfactual explanations for image classification) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2YmzPXtAgc

Last was the book "Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America" by Margot Canaday. Canaday provides a compelling look at the last ~100 years of sexuality and work in America, documenting with archival evidence and interviews the evolution of how LGBTQ+ people navigated their careers and drove changes to organizations and society as a whole. The heartbreaking choices people had to make in the past (and many transgender people still have to choose today) between taking low paying, precarious jobs where they could be themselves vs. careers almost necessarily capped by social norms that were nearly impossible to navigate, was sobering.

This book shines when connecting different time periods as well as Canaday's stunning, rich examination of the "Lavender Scare" period's bureaucratic machinery and counter-activism. The end of the book engages in a lot of speculation about the roots of current corporate support of the LGBTQ+ community without much evidence, and probably would be stronger without those sections. Still, even the sections covering the last few decades provided fascinating insight into how the tech sector, starting with Lotus and Bell Labs, in a limited way pushed the societal conversation around equal rights forward.

Overall this book is necessary reading for those hoping to understand work today and in the past, and the power (and limits) of organizations and individuals to create a more just society. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691205953/queer-career?srsltid=AfmBOoqtBzOmky8YH243-GNtItwCOXVbZ2L1Jxe9QHjqYRPA_o0MLn8d