I spent the previous week in San Diego for NeurIPS 2025. It turns out that San Diego is exactly the kind of place my sun-dependent sanity feels comfortable to live in, if only it weren’t located on the opposite edge of the planet from all the people I care about.
Science-wise, the week was dense: I had the chance to present my recent and ongoing work at two workshops, the Women in Machine Learning workshop, and the Symmetry & Geometry of Neural Representations workshop. I also made my way through several interesting talks and posters, and met a mix of familiar and new faces, whose work I’m excited to follow up on.
I returned with a bag full of goodies from the exhibitions, and a head buzzing with ideas for new projects.
In hindsight, though, I think I still prefer smaller meetings, the kind where you can actually bump into most people twice.