Well my traveling odyssey has started, and while fitting in some meetings before my flight to Tokyo tomorrow I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an important talk by Eric Turkheimer on grappling with “race science” at Penn Medical Ethics and Health Policy. Turkheimer brilliantly strikes at both the fundamental moral and scientific issues with the approach of people in this space and strategies for confronting it in academia. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvu5FLXn1xU

Next was an interesting talk by Hamed Hassani on uncertainty quantification for generative AI systems at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EVhmnxoSGU

Next was a nice talk by Gitta Kutyniok on quantifying reliability in large models at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mabxnS40L1g

Next was a great talk by Jesse Zhang on developing continuous robot learning pipelines at the GRASP Lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgRsWVx5rZE

Next was an excellent talk by Leman Akoglu on benchmarking LLM hallucination detection at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhVb8CCOcZM

Last was “When Trees Testify” by Beronda L. Montgomery. This is a moving, personal tour through a focused portion of botany, with Montgomery using her experiences as a lens to examine the amazing properties of some of America's most iconic trees and their relationship with the Black experience in the US across the centuries. Slavery and lynching feature prominently, but Montgomery doesn't neglect the medicinal, psychological, and social impact of trees. This is best viewed as a scientifically infused memoir, and if that's what you're looking for you won't be disappointed https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250335166/whentreestestify/