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2024

:material-circle-edit-outline: ็บฆ 967 ไธชๅญ— :material-clock-time-two-outline: ้ข„่ฎก้˜…่ฏปๆ—ถ้—ด 3 ๅˆ†้’Ÿ

Never believe in anything that claims to bring you success, never, never, never.

We are what we talk about every day. Talking about math and science and technology makes us full of math and science and technology. Talking about the school administration fills us with nothing but only makes rule adaptors. Talking about unserious entertainment chores makes us trivial characters. Talking about the name of technologies instead of the real details and ideas behind them makes us only excited at the thoughts of 'I will learn/am learning this technology soon!' and become distracted suddenly after clicking into a post or a video about it.

The topic of rules and policies also reminds me of the story of a senior professor who works on computational syntax in the school of international studies at my undergrad school, who ended his 10-year career here and joined another school of a similar (or slightly lower) ranking in Shanghai this year. I saw in his annual summary a sentence going like, in the next 10 years I plan to deal less with the administration materials and procedures but to put the stress on the research that I am really fond of; now given this change in my career, this goal seems pretty at hand.

I sneered for sharing the same feeling with this prof. After joining UWaterloo, I felt that it was the first time in a long time that I was cared for by people around (administrators, profs, colleagues) as an ordinary student -- not because I was doing anything excellent -- in fact, I lagged behind my peers too much. And this is the reason why I should tell myself from time to time, that feeling well for now does not mean feeling well for good. Don't trust your feelings cause it does not lead you to the goal.

To be specific in my researches -- I am mainly in (or to say, leading?) 3 researches this year, and none of them finally yields any paper. Sarcastically, another research that I am not leading was accepted fluently by a top conference (I sincerely thank the talented first author and other helpful co-workers who made the acceptance of this work so undoubtful on the meanwhile of critizing my unintelligence).

I reflected a lot from the rest 3 research on why they currently failed (at least according to my criteria). The first research is a stupid (sorry) benchmark, whose birth now appears too reckless to me -- I was too slow to catch up with the user demands so now few people are using it. I think I will hereby say that I will not make a benchmark unless I desperately feel that a great number of people, or a few but important people, are or will be in need of it, or that I will be the only person who can make it across the world and during the following at least 10 years. Besides, my poor code and data management at the beginning of the year also led to several pitfalls which took me a great amount of time to fix, so now I would like to set up rules for myself, that is to always use unchangeable data ID to identify data pieces and to always consider the searching efficiency when designing the data structure, and to always think of reusing codes (thus I should maintain them more with oop structures). For the rest two projects which are on syntax and multimodal information encoding, I always felt that I didn't know how to introduce them to others esp. my roommates -- always commented that I had no improvement on the models and thus my research was of no use. Okay, I have no words to refute so how to refute will be one of the important questions that I will address in my papers.

Here should have been another paragraph about my another research. It was such a painful experience collaborating with those collaborators that I don't want to recall and write it down here. If you are interested, let's talk about it privately.

I spent much time pondering on choosing the industry or academia, some time looking for an internship, and little time submitting applications, and got response from none. I browsed several posts discussing the career planning for PhDs in the middle of which I found a website open-sourcing the salaries of employed professors from each Canadian university, with their real name. I am a bit shocked by the mere salaries of full professors. A solution to this question also desperately awaits in the following year.

I also traveled a lot and watched a lot of musicals and operas this year (if you are interested in my recommendations, I am working on a list of my favorite musical works), but again I think I should talk about them less and less, since we will become what we talk about. Let's make our conversations full of technologies and ideas that will nurture our knowledge and thoughts.

Anyway, my primary new year's resolution for 2025 is that,

to have a paper such that, whenever people talk about this research area, they think of me; and whenever they think of me, they think of my paper.

This will be the foundation of anything else.

Besides, I hope I can have time to

  • keep exercising to get beautiful arms and healthy waist.
  • keep learning French and German and better knowing a bit Sanskrit, Arabic, Syriac, Greek, and Korean alphabets.
  • travel to the US once, or participate two conferences elsewhere, to connect with my old friends.

It was the most determined year and it was the most confused year, and it will be the most confused year and it will be the most determined year. I'm ready to see.