Early October Academic Playlist

Childcare during the weekend AND nice weather? Yes please. I made fantastic time during a nice long run, and also got to listen to a slew of interesting talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First up was a nice discussion on the ICA Podcast Network with Cindy Gallois on intergroup communication and behavior. As with all of these podcasts I'm less interested in the initial name checking section, but after the first third this picks up getting into some meaty topics around how communication research can impact other fields.

Next we have another excellent ICA Podcast discussion with Linda Putnam . The conversation here is focused on the big research problems in communication and how researchers in that space can expand to collaborate with more fields, particularly in computer science and management.

Next was a Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute talk by Siddharth Srivastava on using abstractions for robotics modeling and explanation. The section of this talk on how to build general purpose explanation mechanisms for robotics was particularly fascinating and highly recommended.

Next was a brilliant talk at 美国哥伦比亚大学商学院 by Renée Richardson Gosline on the importance of friction in algorithm-driven systems. This talk concisely gets at a lot of the important reasons to include friction in these systems, and while I don't agree with all of the conclusions here, I generally think this perspective is extremely important for people analytics.

Staying at Columbia, Tony O. Elumelu, C.F.R has a stirring discussion on management, entrepreneurship, development, African success, and beyond. I highly recommend this talk, and make sure to stick around for the Q&A.

Now to the Abraham Kuyper Center for an interesting talk by Hannah Rubin on investigating the impact of networks on citation differences for demographic groups using simulations. I like the method here more than the results, since I have some questions about the exact implementation, but folks in management should take note - this approach seems like it could be fruitful for investigating the relationship between productivity and DEI.

Last but not least was an absolutely stellar talk by James Evans at the Abraham Kuyper Center on the social and demographic predictors of scientific performance. If you're at all interested in science, management, productivity, innovation, teamwork, or any vaguely related topic, this is a must listen. It's hard for me to say enough good things about this talk. Suffice to say I'll be passing this one around and thinking of how to apply these findings in my own work moving forward.