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SUMMARY:VOILA! Season 5 episode 4: AI & Science
DTSTART:20260702T140000Z
DTSTAMP:20260624T221954Z
CATEGORIES:
DESCRIPTION:Seminar page: https://voila-seminars.tilda.ws/tpost/s5e4-ai-sc
 ience \nDate and time: July 2 2026\, 4:00-5:30 PM CEST\nSpeaker:  Prof. 
 Elliott Ash\nAffiliation: ETH Zurich\n____________________________________
 ____________________________________\nTitle: Read the Paper\, Write the Co
 de: Agentic Reproduction of Social-Science Results \nTopic AI & Science\n
 In this Talk: Recent work has used LLM agents to reproduce empirical socia
 l science results with access to both the data and code. We broaden this s
 cope by asking: Can they reproduce results given only a paper's methods de
 scription and original data? We develop an agentic reproduction system tha
 t extracts structured methods descriptions from papers\, runs reimplement
 ations under strict information isolation -- agents never see the origina
 l code\, results\, or paper -- and enables deterministic\, cell-level comp
 arison of reproduced outputs to the original results. An error attribution
  step traces discrepancies through the system chain to identify root cause
 s. Evaluating four agent scaffolds and four LLMs on 48 papers with human-v
 erified reproducibility\, we find that agents can largely recover publishe
 d results\, but performance varies substantially between models\, scaffold
 s\, and papers. Root cause analysis reveals that failures stem both from a
 gent errors and from underspecification in the papers themselves.\n \nSp
 eaker's BIO: Elliott Ash is Associate Professor of Law\, Economics\, and D
 ata Science at ETH Zurich's Center for Law & Economics\, Switzerland. Prof
 . Ash is also a Scientific Lead in the Swiss AI Initiative\, CEPR Research
  Affiliate (Political Economy)\, Associate Editor at Economic Journal\, C
 o-Editor at Journal of Law and Economics\, ETH AI Center Core Faculty\, a
 nd recipient of a European Research Council Starting Grant. Previously\, h
 e held research appointments at New York University (Scholar in Residence)
 \, University of Warwick (Assistant Professor) and Princeton University (P
 ostdoc). He received a Ph.D. in Economics and J.D. from Columbia Universit
 y\, a B.A. (Plan II Honors) from University of Texas at Austin\, and an LL
 .M. in international criminal law from University of Amsterdam.\n Elliott
 's research and teaching focus on empirical analysis of the law and legal 
 system using techniques from econometrics\, natural language processing\, 
 and machine learning. His research has been published in American Economic
  Journal: Applied Economics\, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy\,
  Journal of Law and Economics\, Annual Review of Economics\, Economic Jou
 rnal\, Cornell Law Review\, Georgetown Law Journal\, Journal of Public Eco
 nomics\, Journal of Politics\, and Political Analysis. Elliott’s researc
 h has earned grant funding from the European Research Council\, Swiss Nati
 onal Science Foundation\, Swiss Data Science Center\, U.S. National Scienc
 e Foundation\, the Turing Institute\, and the Washington Center for Equita
 ble Growth.
LOCATION:  
ORGANIZER:EFELIA Côte d'Azur
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