#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/5/24

It was great seeing all of the pitches in Ramesh Raskar's AI Venture Studio class at the MIT Media Lab, and while navigating the first snow of the season on the commute I was also able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an incredible panel on the hidden human labor powering AI at the LSE, James Muldoon, and Kirsten Sehnbruch. They dig deep into the exploitative labor system underlying pretty much every large AI system out there, and I can't wait to read their book on this. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMavy0u4ZsY&t=1s

Next was a short discussion on the effects of helping job seekers signal their skills with Marianne Bertrand and Stefano Caria on the VoxDev podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1iyRKtLJdc

Next was a great talk by Barbara Bierer on ethics and oversight of clinical trials with decentralized elements at the CU Center for Bioethics and Humanities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc3EF08kXQo

Next was an interesting talk by Sharut Gupta on improving test-time adaptation in large models using unlabelled data at MIT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-R0wtksZEA

Next was the National Bureau of Economic Research's Competition and Regulation of Digital Platforms symposium, with notable talks by Andrey Fradkin (experiment on Amazon measuring self-preferencing and consumer welfare effects), Malika Korganbekova (experiment at Wayfair on user privacy/personalization tradeoffs), Lulu Wang (regulating competing payment networks), and Michael Sullivan (price control effects on DoorDash) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJVGe3Rgo-w

Unfortunately Tobias Salz's talk has a sound snafu, but he gave a talk on this paper at the Toulouse School of Economics a few weeks ago that you can watch instead here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=salvZFUs45E

Next was "Quantum Entanglement" by Jed Brody. If you're like myself and lack a substantial physics background but want an accessible introduction to quantum entanglement, this is the book for you. You'll probably need some decent mathematics and statistics chops/intuition to appreciate the concepts explained here in a single reading, but if you do you'll leave with a high level understanding of this topic. I would've liked the book to be longer and expand upon more of the underlying physics and related topics in quantum physics, but it's still a very good read https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4632/Quantum-Entanglement

Last was "Ambedkar's India" by B.R. Ambedkar. This is a good collection of some of Ambedkar's most important writings - The Grammar of Anarchy, Annihilation of Caste, and Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development. This is deeply reflective writing that also reveals some of the holes in Ambedkar's thinking when read today (the constant referral of indigenous groups as "savages" as well as essentially the entire third essay were especially problematic). With the fight for Dalit and Muslim rights in India still ongoing, these writings from Ambedkar at the dawn of India's independence are worth revisiting. Highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Ambedkars-India-B-R-Ambedkar/dp/9387022897