#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/21/24

It was a beautiful day in Boston, and luckily I was able to go out for a nice run complete with talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an excellent talk by Nan Jiang on off-policy evaluation in non-Markov environments (with motivation from RLHF for LLMs) at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. This is another one of those works in practice but not in theory talks, which is always wonderful to listen to and Jiang provides intuition for the challenges as well as new theory to bridge the gap. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7JSM7tOlJ0

Next was an intriguing talk by Brian DePasquale on designing spiking networks (as well as a teaser on olfactory sensing modeling) at the Kempner Institute at Harvard University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW6M7wlhNiw

Next was a great talk by Yu-Xiang Wang on why neural network models work better in practice than other general function approximators at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLRHPTUPOac&t=13s

Next was an informative talk by Jason Harris and Lindsay Powers on US and Australian jurisprudence around non-consensual third party releases in insolvency, focusing on the Purdue Pharma case, at the University of Sydney Law School https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TnbSo9gqpo&t=1s

Next was a fantastic talk by Sanmi Koyejo on predictability and surprise in language model benchmarks at the Simons Institute. Koyejo methodically breaks down the concept of "emergence," showing how the choice of evaluation metrics creates massive illusions in performance gains. I like his FAccT talk on this a bit better, but if you haven't watched that this is a can't miss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pQrKGfaY5A

Next was a compelling talk by Ruth Okediji on the prospects for indigenous knowledge changing the international intellectual property law regime and the colonial history of the current regime at the Cambridge Faculty of Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-vndps57N0

Next was an interesting talk by Najoung Kim on human and machine inductive biases for compositional linguistic generation - or why LLMs still have significant linguistic holes - at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkFgrAM1LZM

Last was "Soul by Soul" by Walter Johnson. Learning more about the slave market and the central role it played in the lives and social structure of enslaved people and white southerners is moving and gives important context to inequalities and racist attitudes/systems that persist to today. The dehumanization of so many people, and the way that the slave trade in particular was deeply engrained in the antebellum US south is rarely so viscerally illustrated as it is here. Johnson provides a thorough qualitative examination of the institution through a wide array of diaries, recorded interviews, and (notably) court cases.

The court case records are particularly disturbing and fascinating, as they show how deep into US government and jurisprudence slavery and the slave trade reached, as well as the depth of investment in the US in keeping this institution functional. It would have been much more instructive if these analyses were paired with more quantitative analyses of these cases, as well as some of the other horrors documented in the slave markets themselves. Still, if you are in the mental space to learn about this essential but troubling topic I would highly recommend this book

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674005396