#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/12/24

It was nice spending Yom Kippur with the family, and while resting after services I was able to go on a walk and listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a pair of talks by Simon Laughlin on the brain's energy expenditure/neural activity and the principles of neural design at the UC Santa Barbara SAGE Center. I particularly liked the examination of brain energy expenditure by age, as well as the more isolated neural systems examined in non-human animals.

Energetic Brain Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv6z980KsuY&t=1s
Neural Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5JAwXLKIPQ&t=4s

Next was an intriguing talk by Hadas Kress-Gazit on formal methods for robotics in the age of big data, along with a nice soapbox moment on the poor evaluations of large models, at the University of Toronto Robotics Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1FNOImHo-0

Next was a fascinating talk by Charles Spence on multisensory flavor perception at the SAGE Center (FYI the recording cuts out before the end of the talk) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFtFGwNGRkc

Last was an interesting talk by Erdem Bıyık on combining pre-processing steps on robot training data to better facilitate robot learning and performance with minimal human feedback https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDmMwfcesxQ