Speaker: CHENG MengjieVenue: A523 School of Management, Zijingang CampusAbstract: We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives—making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm’s editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York Times, we first show that more engaging human-written content tends to be more polarizing. Further, naively employing LLMs (with prompts or standard Direct Preference Optimization approaches) to generate more engaging content can also increase polarization. This has an important managerial and policy implication: using LLMs without building in controls for limiting slant can exacerbate news media polarization. We present a constructive solution to this problem based on the Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MCDPO) algorithm, a novel approach that integrates Direct Preference Optimization with multi-objective optimization techniques. We build on open-source LLMs and develop a new language model that simultaneously makes content more engaging while maintaining a preferred editorial stance. Our model achieves this by modifying content characteristics strongly associated with polarization, but that have a relatively smaller impact on engagement. Our approach and findings apply to other settings where firms seek to use LLMs for content creation to achieve multiple objectives, e.g., advertising and social media.

Speaker: Prof. Luca ValentiVenue: E122, College of Animal Sciences, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Professor Luca Valenti is the head of Biological Resource Center, the Precision Medicine Lab and the Omics Lab of Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Policlinico Milano, University of Milan as an internist and clinical hepatologist at the Department of Transfusion Medicine. He has authored more than 200 publications as main author in journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Genetics, Gut, and Journal of Hepatology (Scholar: 50,000 citations, H-index 108).His main research interests are metabolic and genetic liver diseases, with a special focus on steatotic/fatty liver disease (SLD) and iron metabolism disorders. He conducts genetic studies in well-characterized clinical and population-based cohorts, integrated with translational research with evaluation of biomarkers and biological pathways in clinical samples, and experimental studies in vivo and in vitro multilineage 3D models.

Speaker: Ni YiVenue: 210 Haina Complex Building 2, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Knot Floer homology is an invariant of knots in closed 3-manifolds. This invariant captures a great deal of information about the topology of knot complements. In particular, when a knot is fibered, the information contained in knot Floer homology provides insight into the monodromy of the fibration. I will survey recent work on this topic, including results on bounding the number of fixed points and the characterization of right-veering monodromy.

Speaker: Tai ThaiVenue: Room B328, Anzhong Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Composite steel-concrete structures leverage the merits of both steel and concrete materials (e.g., steel has high strength and offers fast and modular construction, whilst concrete has high stiffness and fire resistance). Therefore, they have been increasingly used in high-rise buildings as evidenced by the fact that composite structures have contributed up to about two-thirds of the structural systems used in the top 100 world tallest buildings completion in 2024. This presentation will highlight recent research and developments of composite structural systems used in modern tall buildings. They include composite columns, composite shear walls, and composite joints used in conventional composite buildings (i.e., beam-to-column joints and beam-to-wall joints) as well as the joints used in modular composite buildings (i.e., inter-module joints and module-to-core joints). The research will look at the performance of composite structural systems under both ambient temperatures and elevated temperatures (i.e., fire loading). The presentation will cover experimental testing, numerical modelling, and design code development that was recently incorporated into the new version of composite standard AS/NZS 2327.

Speaker: Prof. David Scott KastanVenue: Online, Tencent Meeting: 253 323 366, passcode: 2025Abstract: In the spring of 1594, a long narrative poem by Shakespeare was published and advertised for sale in London. The title page called it Lucrece. Now the poem is usually known as The Rape of Lucrece, though it was only in 1616 (in its sixth edition) that this became the poem’s title. Perhaps this talk should be called much ado about a title, but it seems to me to offer a way to help us think about the strange poem that is about both rape and revolution, set in the legendary Roman past as the monarchy is overthrown and “the state government changed from kings to consuls.”

Speaker: Prof. Siyu ChenVenue: Room 618, Building of School of economics, Zijingang CampusAbstract: We examine whether investment performance reflects educatable skill or innate ability. Linking China's national college entrance examination (CEE) records (1999-2003 cohorts) to ten years of detailed stock brokerage transactions (2014-2023), we find no significant effect of higher education or financial training on investor performance: elite college graduates and economics majors earn similar returns, Sharpe ratios, and risk profiles as their near-miss counterparts. In contrast, conditional on a rich set of fixed effects, CEE rank, a proxy for innate cognitive ability, strongly predicts portfolio returns. A ten-percentile improvement in CEE rank raises monthly portfolio returns by about 0.05 percentage points, which compounds substantially: investors in the top quartile of CEE rank realize roughly 61 percent higher total returns over ten years than those in the bottom quartile. High-ability investors select higher-ROA, lower-risk stocks, trade less frequently, and engage financial advisors more rationally and less overconfidently. Our results suggest that heterogeneity in returns to wealth largely reflects ability rather than educational credentials.

Speaker: Prof. Ming ZengVenue: Room 530, Chengjun No.7 Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) displays presidential cycles: it earns 4.1% per year during Democratic presidencies but its profitability increases significantly to 14.9% during Republican presidencies. Survey-based evidence also indicates substantial underreaction to earnings news when the US president is Republican. The tax component of firm earnings exhibits significantly higher volatility during Republican periods, likely reflecting higher tax policy uncertainty. Consistently, we find that the PEAD is much stronger for firms with larger exposure to tax policy changes during Republican presidencies. This explanation accounts for the observed presidential cycles in PEAD, whereas existing explanations for PEAD cannot. The cycles are more pronounced among non-microcap firms.

Speaker: Prof. David SternVenue: Room 201, East No.5 Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: As the field of the History of the Book has grown, a sub-set of the field has developed that might be called “The Material Text,” which is devoted to inspecting the relationship of text to its material inscription, the impact of one upon the other, their connection to reading practice, and the changes that both text and material inscriptions undergo historically. Examples will be drawn from the history of the Jewish book, the speaker’s field of specialization.

Speaker: Prof. Ardis ButterfieldVenue: Room 201, East No.5 Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: This talk presents a panoramic view of a new edition of Medieval Lyrics in Britain (forthcoming with CUP). A 20-year project, it presents a copying history of lyric from the 12th to the late 15th century. It presents the verses by paying special attention to the manuscripts in which they were copied, to the world of often idiosyncratic handwritten symbols, flourishes and annotations in which they were framed, of musical notation and richly conceived programs of illumination. It is a media study of medieval lyrics as forms of inscription (on parchment but also many other media), of sound, and image.