2024 in Review

by Vagrant Gautam

An assortment of work and non-work updates from 2024.


Hello from Vancouver, where it is surprisingly warm! I'm spending Christmas with loved ones and reflecting on what's been the fullest year of my life so far. Here's what happened.

A view of English Bay looking delightfully blue on a bright day with a sunny blue sky, unusual for Vancouver in December. There are some sailboats on the water, and two snoozing birds, which might be goldeneyes. This picture was taken at Vanier Park, after a trip to the Museum of Vancouver.

Work

I was on 7 papers (3 first author, 2 co-first, 3 second), I gave 10 talks, I did a research visit in Hamburg, and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies awarded me their Independent Postdoc fellowship! To start this position in 2025, I have to wrap up my PhD a year early, so I'll probably be writing my thesis for the foreseeable future.

Despite managing to do everything I did this year, I somehow have more imposter syndrome than a year ago! Objectively, I know more things because I've read lots of papers and books, and I've even created new knowledge. But all of this has also revealed that there are things I didn't even know I didn't know, and in so many different areas. As Weizenbaum has said, I "stand in awe before the depth of [my] subject matter." I am humbled by it.[1]

At the same time, I am enjoying research more than ever, because learning is just so much fun. It helps to have collaborators who are as knowledgeable and generous as mine—particularly Anne, Arjun, Marius, and Zeerak.

Non-work

My evenings, weekends and holidays have been just as busy. I got to show eight visitors around Saarbrücken this year, and I travelled to see people I love in other places. I also moved, after which I've been cooking more, watching more TV, and making and drinking lots of coffee with our new espresso machine.

2024 was a year of some interesting firsts, such as my first cat cafe, fondue, and bath bomb. I also tried bouldering for the first time and it felt horribly unnatural (so I might do it again). One friend taught me how to drive manual, and then I completely forgot their lesson by the time I drove another friend's dad's tractor for the first time out in the German countryside. I also tried his automatic lawn mower after. I was pretty awful at all of this but everyone was quite nice about it. This year I also bought a sketchbook and made some mediocre visual art, mostly with ink and watercolours. There were also some firsts that I was actually good at: I watched Grey's Anatomy (yes, all 19 seasons), I finally managed to donate blood, and I visited a bunch of places on vacation for the first time -- Cochem, Trier, Heidelberg, Kaiserslautern, Kiel and Schwerin in Germany, and New York, Brussels, Ghent and Bruges outside. I hit two big milestones this year beyond firsts -- finishing all my name change bureaucracy after 2.5 years, and finishing the Duolingo German course after 3 years and change.

I've been worse than usual at tracking what birds I saw this year, but here are the lifers I remember: In northern Germany I saw my first tufted ducks, horned grebes and barnacle geese, and in southern Germany, I saw my first goldcrest and bullfinch. I also saw a flock of white ibis while in Miami for a conference. Some birders and I made plans to ditch the conference in favour of birding on a couple of mornings, and we saw a night heron, brown pelicans, common and boat-tailed grackles, a Muscovy duck, and a blue-gray gnatcatcher, most of which are lifers for me. One nice thing about this year has been the opportunity to share birds with other people more than usual. In both Saarbrücken and Vancouver, I've enjoyed showing people moorhens, Egyptian geese, tits, cormorants, coots, pintails, long-billed dowitchers, green- and blue-winged teals, scaup, and mergansers. Apart from these live birds, I saw hundreds of dead ones in natural history museums in Basel, New York, Kiel, Berlin, and more, and found typos in at least two museums, which made me feel smug.

Intentions for 2025

My work goals are clear: I want to write fewer first author papers, but do more risky work. After my PhD, I want to think and learn more about advising students, picking and evaluating research ideas, and reinventing myself and my research as fields and funding priorities change. One explicit intention I have is to read more mathy and theoretical machine learning papers. Here are some example paper titles: Sparse Continuous Distributions and Fenchel-Young Losses, Wrapped β-Gaussians with compact support for exact probabilistic modeling on manifolds, DAG Learning on the Permutahedron.[2] I find it impossible to read this kind of work at the moment, because I'm unfamiliar with the conventions and feel intimidated by all the scary-looking new words. But that's also how I felt about critical theory, philosophy, etc., before making a concerted effort to read work in these domains over the last few years. I'm only semi-ashamed to admit it took me 2-3 years to understand the word epistemology; you have to start somewhere.

Outside of work, I hope to continue to find joy in trying new stuff and being bad at it, spend enough time resting and tending to my relationships, and see more people and places on vacation.

Happy almost new year, and see you on the other side!

  1. I can't recommend this enough: Weizenbaum, J. (1972). On the Impact of the Computer on Society. ↩︎

  2. I'm so sorry I can't understand half your work, Vlad. ↩︎