Speaker: Rowan AlcockVenue: Tencent Meeting (Online)-ID 827 581 925, Password 170134Abstract: This presentation is underpinned by a body of six articles dissecting Polanyi's countermovement and its contemporary relevance (Alcock 2020, 2023, 2024, 2026a, 2026b, 2026c). These articles argue that Polanyi understood the countermovement as atomised self-protective reactions against the negative effects of market encroachment rather than ideologically informed social movements against the market system as a whole – contradicting the majority of the contemporary literature on the countermovement.The presentation will concentrate on two articles published in 2026. The first, titled ‘Polanyi’s Non-Ideological Countermovement: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’, locates eight arguments within Polanyi's The Great Transformation, and other work, that demonstrate the countermovement is a non-ideologically informed movement.The second article, titled ‘The Double Movement in Action: Karl Polanyi, Food Safety and China's Rural Transformation’, is the first publication to use the non-ideological countermovement concept in a case study. This article argues China's rural–urban divide provides a cleavage that helps illuminate Polanyi's non-ideological countermovement concept. Informed by Xu et al's (2013) “One family, two systems” study on a peasant countermovement in which peasant farmers grow two forms of crop: one for the market which uses more chemical inputs and a second for self-consumption which uses fewer or no chemical inputs as protection from potential negative effects of chemical residues. I take this logic to a vegetable market to ascertain if there is a similar consumer countermovement. These countermovements, which are protections against the perceived negative effects of marketized produce, which demands unblemished ‘good looking’ vegetables, do not articulate an open ideological critique of the market system. Therefore, I suggest they conform well to Polanyi's description of a countermovement.  The presentation will finish by putting forward arguments on the potential and complications of using Polanyi's countermovement concept in contemporary China referencing a third article titled ‘Polanyi in Rural China: Beyond the Double Movement’.

Speaker: Zhou HuaijunVenue: Lecture Room E122, College of Animal Science Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Dr. Huaijun Zhou is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis. His research integrates genetics, functional genomics, epigenetics, and bioinformatics to understand how genetic variation and gene regulation shape complex traits in farm animals, with a particular emphasis on poultry. His work connects fundamental discoveries in genome function with efforts to improve animal health, production efficiency, and environmental adaptability. Dr. Zhou co-chairs the Steering Committee of the international Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) Consortium and co-coordinates FarmGTEx, including ChickenGTEx. These collaborative initiatives link genetic variation to genome function and economically important traits, providing a foundation for precision animal breeding. He previously directed the USAID Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Genomics to Improve Poultry and served as USDA Poultry Genome Coordinator. He received the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences in 2023 and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2024, he was named among the World Food Prize Foundation’s inaugural Top Agrifood Pioneers. His recent honors include the 2026 American Society of Animal Science Innovation in Animal Breeding and Genetics Award and the UC Davis Exceptional Faculty Award.

Speaker: Nirbhay N. YadavVenue: Lecture Room 122, Floor 1,No.6 Teaching Building, Yuquan CampusAbstract: The central nervous system (CNS) heavily relies on glucose for its energy needs and for providing the building blocks needed for signaling, maintenance, and repair. Because the brain has high, continuous energy requirements and very limited fuel reserves, glycogen acts as a dynamic glucose-derived buffer and supports local energy demands in times of need. Disruptions in the synthesis or degradation of glycogen can result in several different functional disorders. For example, glycogen storage diseases (GSDs) are a group of rare inherited diseases caused by genetic mutations that encode enzymes that regulate the synthesis or breakdown of glycogen. Some types of GSDs have severe CNS consequences including difficulty in breathing and gait, accelerated neurodegeneration, and brain atrophy. In more common neurodegenerative disorders, altered glycogen levels may reflect neuroenergetic stress when neuronal glucose utilization and mitochondrial function are impaired. Treatment options for altered glycogen metabolism are under development, but there is a lack of non-invasive imaging tools to assess disease progression and treatment efficacy. In this talk, I will detail the development of a non-invasive MRI-based biomarker to imaging glycogen across the brain and show its applications to GSDs and Parkinson's disease.

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.