#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/14/24

It was a pretty relaxing Saturday, and while going for a nice walk in late fall Boston I was able to also enjoy some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the National Bureau of Economic Research's Big Data, AI, and Financial Economics symposium, with a standout talk by Bradford (Lynch) Levy on using fine-tuned, GPT-2 style LLMs to identify surprising information in corporate filings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz0A3D2P9DM&t=9s

Next was an excellent talk by Valentin Hofmann on probing covert racism in LLMs at the USC Information Sciences Institute. Hofmann focuses on dialectic prejudice, showing that LLMs, even commercial models, exhibit troubling outputs when fed African American English data. Pretty strongly implies that all tests of bias need to examine these issues as well. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNXap9E8i8

Last was "Born in Blackness" by Howard French. This book combines in-depth, rigorous historical research with real-world investigative detail that provides a unique and essential inquiry into the last 500 years of world history. This provides a much richer view of intra-continental politics and developments than I've seen anywhere else, as well as a more holistic examination of the interactions between different African polities and European powers. The analysis doesn't get any less insightful when venturing to the Americas, covering in detail the importance of the sugar industry in driving the slave trade and occupation of the West Indies, the Haitian Revolution, and more. Highly recommend https://wwnorton.com/books/born-in-blackness