#AcademicRunPlaylist - 5/1/25

I had a lovely day on campus, and while commuting I listened to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Ricardo Garcia Pinel on learning language-guided policies for robotic manipulation at Ai2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapMZKr-lHc

Next was the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford "Global Southing" internet and data studies workshop. I particularly liked Andrés Domínguez Hernández's talk on AI's epistemic risks and the automation of innovation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7wQScai26w

Next was an excellent talk by Sulin Liu on discrete diffusion with planned denoising at Ai2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZYqvDaurl4

Last was "A History of African Americans Volume I," edited by Robin Kelley and Earl Lewis. This historical collection covers the history of African Americans from the beginnings of colonization to 1880, methodically working through these different time periods. The chapters give good coverage of the historical record, and serve as a good grounding for future reading if you want to dive more into particular geographies/phenomena, although there's less in-depth analysis than I'd like. Highly recommend https://global.oup.com/academic/product/to-make-our-world-anew-9780195181340