“Thinking vs. Doing: Cognitive Capacity, Decision Making and Medical Diagnosis” | Jonathan Kolstad (Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley)

Speaker: David Eisenberg, UCLAHost: Amy KeatingTitle: "Surprising mechanism of small molecules that disassemble pathological amyloid fibrils associated with neurodegeneration" The Rich LectureThe Biology Colloquium is a weekly seminar held throughout the academic year — featuring distinguished speakers in many areas of the biological sciences from universities and institutions worldwide. More information on speakers, their affiliations, and titles of their talks will be added as available. Unless otherwise stated, the Colloquium will be held live in Stata 32-123 (Kirsch auditorium) Contact Margaret Cabral with questions.

Thomas Drechsel Univ. of Maryland

Speaker: Adam Logan (Tutte Institute and Carleton University)Title: Kodaira dimension of Hilbert modular threefoldsAbstract:Following a method introduced by Thomas-Vasquez and developed by Grundman, we prove that many Hilbert modular threefolds of arithmetic genus $0$ and $1$ are of general type, and that some are of nonnegative Kodaira dimension. The new ingredient is a detailed study of the geometry and combinatorics of totally positive integral elements $x$ of a fractional ideal $I$ in a totally real number field $K$ with the property that tr $xy < $ min $I$ tr $y$ for some $y \gg 0 \in K$.

John Waugh Lecture

Joel Leibo, senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind and professor at King's College London, will speak in Singleton Auditorium as part of the Quest and CBMM seminar series on March 4th.Title: A theory of Appropriateness with Applications to Generative Artificial IntelligenceAbstract: What is appropriateness? Humans navigate a multi-scale mosaic of interlocking notions of what is appropriate for different situations. We act one way with our friends, another with our family, and yet another in the office. Likewise for AI, appropriate behavior for a comedy-writing assistant is not the same as appropriate behavior for a customer-service representative. What determines which actions are appropriate in which contexts? And what causes these standards to change over time? Since all judgments of AI appropriateness are ultimately made by humans, we need to understand how appropriateness guides human decision making in order to properly evaluate AI decision making and improve it. In this talk, I will present a theory of appropriateness: how it functions in human society, how it may be implemented in the brain, and what it means for responsible deployment of generative AI technology.