#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/6/24

Fall is definitely here, and wall enjoying the foliage I also enjoyed talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an excellent talk by Alane Suhr on generalization in natural language processing at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Suhr deeply examines a lot of fundamental assumptions in NLP and AI more broadly - what do words mean? what is language? how should we evaluate performance/generalization? Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zkhXXKBHRg

Next was an interesting talk by Paul Liang on multisensory AI (including smell!) at the MIT Embodied Intelligence Seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1OaYHnzCuE

Next was an intriguing talk by Andrej Risteski on generalization properties of score-based losses at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdwxbQsmFG0

Last was "Unworthy Republic" by Claudio Saunt. This book narrows the focus of Native American dispossession in modern day Georgia and Florida during the Andrew Jackson administration, and that focus provides a harrowing account of a racially-driven dispossession machinery in unprecedented detail. It's hard to read some of these accounts and not see echoes of them in Nazism and other bureaucracy-driven genocides in the following years - the huge administration that was stood up to deport Native Americans, the strict accounting processes and budgets, and the dehumanization of an entire people.

Saunt deftly mixes first hand written accounts, historical records, and statistics to provide a holistic perspective on this tragedy. The juxtaposition of atrocities with current cities and attractions in Georgia and Florida is jarring, with the lack of American acknowledgement made that much more difficult to comprehend. While this is a tough read, it should be required reading for those who want to better understand a formative part of American and world history and gain perspective on current attempts to repeat it. Highly recommend https://wwnorton.com/books/unworthy-republic