Speaker: Mohammad ShahidehpourVenue: Room 204, No 4. Teaching Building, Yuquan CampusAbstract: The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving unprecedented investment in large-scale data centers. These facilities provide the computing power needed for AI applications, scientific research, and digital innovation, making them critical components of modern infrastructure. However, AI data centers also create significant challenges. Their increasing electricity demand places pressure on power grids and requires substantial investments in energy generation and transmission. Environmental concerns, including energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water usage for cooling, have intensified the search for sustainable solutions such as renewable energy and more efficient technologies.Beyond technical issues, AI data centers raise important governance questions related to cybersecurity, data privacy, transparency, and fair access to computing resources. Policymakers, industry leaders, and communities must work together to balance innovation with environmental responsibility and public interest. A strategic approach that addresses computing growth, energy security, sustainability, and governance will be essential to ensuring the long-term benefits of AI infrastructure.

Speaker: Miao WeitingVenue: Room 718, Complex Building, School of Economics, Zijingang CampusAbstract: This paper studies how geoeconomic fragmentation reshapes dynamic technology rivalry. Distilling key empirical features from novel data on the semiconductor foundry industry, I develop and estimate a dynamic oligopoly model of step-by-step innovation with trade disruption risk and industrial policies. In an integrated global market, firms that lag sufficiently behind the technological frontier optimally cease investing, as the step-by-step structure of innovation and persistently thin follower margins limit expected post-innovation rents. Export controls and investment restrictions alter this equilibrium. By reducing direct frontier competition and securing protected home demand, such policies can unintentionally restore innovation incentives for lagging firms, while potentially reducing spillovers and increasing innovation costs. The net effect depends on the trade-off between weaker knowledge diffusion and the rents created by protected domestic markets.

Speaker: Shen Ziyang  Venue: Tencent Meeting-193-270-879(Online)Abstract: A principal with private information asks agents to acquire costly information and make action recommendations. An agent is then hired to implement his recommendation on the principal's behalf. The principal wants the right action to be executed, while the agents want to get hired. The optimal mechanism for inducing information acquisition involves approaching agents sequentially without revealing any history and hiring as soon as possible. An agent's incentive problem features what we call the pivotality effect: in situations where the agent's report is pivotal, he may misreport to improve his chance of being hired. When the principal and the agents agree about the precision of her private information, this effect is weak, and both information acquisition and truthful reporting can be fully achieved when the cost of information acquisition is small. When the principal is overconfident about her signal precision, the pivotality effect is amplified, and adverse selection can arise even when the cost is arbitrarily small. Two remedies restore truthful reporting: consulting enough agents, and separating advice from execution.

Speaker: Sally ShuttleworthVenue: Room 201, East No.5 Teaching Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: When the film “RoboCop” was first released in 1987, the publicity slogan was “This cop does not stop for donuts.” Its comic phrasing encapsulates many of our current debates about the differences between man and machine. In this talk I look at the ways in which contemporary concerns around AI are prefigured in the nineteenth century, when the rise of industrial machinery, and also the Darwinian revolution, led to new ways of conceptualizing the operations of the human mind and body. Fears that machines might supersede humans are not new.The talk concludes with reflections on current ambitions in AI, and the impact of science fiction on Silicon Valley tech bros’ visions of the future.

Speaker: Sally ShuttleworthVenue: Room 404, East No.1B Teaching Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Can the Humanities and Sciences collaborate in fruitful ways? What is to be gained by breaking through disciplinary boundaries? And can Humanities research have impact outside the field of academia? This lecture seeks to answer some of these questions by looking at some of the research activities involved in a couple of large projects I have directed. The first, “Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries,” funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, was run in conjunction with the Royal Society, the Natural History Museum, London, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England, as well as the world’s largest online Citizen Science platform, Zooniverse. It involved working with astrophysicists, medical professionals, botanists, mathematicians, vulcanologists and museum staff. The second project, “Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives,” funded by the European Research Council, involved working with psychiatrists and epidemiologists, as well as theatre companies, and projection artists. The talk will consider the rewards, and also the challenges, of such work, and also the possibilities opened up for the Humanities by citizen science.

Speaker: Vladislav YakovlevVenue: Lecture Room, Floor 1,Chow Yei Ching Building, Yuquan CampusAbstract: Brillouin scattering is an inelastic light scattering on acoustic phonons in the medium and is uniquely positioned to assess local viscoelastic properties of materials by analyzing the frequency shift and the linewidth of a Brillouin peak. The advances of optical instrumentation have led to a transformative progress in Brillouin microscopy triggering it renaissance and facilitating numerous applications in biology and medicine. Brillouin microscopy uniquely positions itself with respect to other optical methods to explore mechanical properties of tissues by offering higher resolution imaging and 3D imaging capabilities. In the most recent Consensus Statement, we outlined the state-of-the-art of instrumentation and provided the major advantages and guidelines for using Brillouin microscopy for biological imaging. In this presentation, I will summarize the status quo of the field, highlight some of the most recent advantages, such as quantum-enhanced Brillouin microscopy imaging, and outline the possible directions towards higher speed and deeper tissue imaging, while discussing potential emerging applications to neuronal and metabolic imaging.

Speaker: Liang LihongVenue: Room A423, School of Management, Zijingang CampusAbstract: This paper investigates how passive institutional ownership affects the optimistic bias in analyst forecasts. Using Russell index reconstitution as an exogenous shock to passive ownership, we find that passive ownership reduces analyst optimism. We also document stronger market reactions to forecast revisions for firms with higher passive ownership, consistent with less optimistic opinions conveying more credible information. Further tests show that the effect of passive institutional ownership holds before and after the Global Settlement and the self-regulatory organization rules, however, the effect is more significant before the regulations than after. Overall, our results suggest that passive investment can curb analyst optimism.

Speaker: Charles BurnettVenue: Room 201, No 5. East Teaching Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: In the Tempest Prospero is the magus, the magician, who commands the spirit Ariel, who has other spirits under his control. He is recognizable as a particular kind of magician, whose actions are described in works preceding and contemporary with Shakespeare, such as Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. Two kinds of magic can be recognized: effects achieved through the agency of spirits, and those brought about by ‘heavenly music’. 

Speaker: Quan YuchengVenue: Room 426, Complex Building, School of Economics, Zijingang CampusAbstract: This research examines the effects of entry deregulation in the information intermediary sector, with a focus on China's Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) industry. We explore the implications of a market-oriented reform that eliminated entry barriers to the sector and analyze its impacts on EIA report quality, polluting firms, and local residents. Our findings reveal that, although the reform led to a sixfold increase in the number of EIA agencies, it inadvertently resulted in a decline in service quality and EIA participation, ultimately leading to a deterioration in ambient environmental conditions. A model in which entry dilutes each agency's incentive to invest in unobservable quality rationalizes this. Entry deregulation is hazardous where quality is unverifiable and failures fall on third parties.