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 well-being 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.
This conference visit would not have been possible without the generous travel fund from the Women in Machine Learning community and the reviewer award I received from the conference organizers.
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.