📅 Previous write-ups: 2022
📍 like in previous year, I am writing this in my family’s cozy living room in Starý Plzenec, Czech Republic
What would be a word that best describes the year 2023?
When looking back to how my personal circumstances were at the end of 2022, and realizing how many things have changed since last Christmas, the word “transition” immediately comes to mind. While there’s no doubt that every year comes with its fair share of changes, this year truly did feel like a step (leap?) forward in life - fortunately, I do consider all of those changes as good (perhaps except for the end of my twenties lol). What follows is a brief summary of all those personal leaps:
I have entered 2023 as a doctoral candidte at University of Strathclyde, and leave it with my Ph.D. concluded.
Over the last Christmas break in 2022, I have spent a considerable amount of time writing, compiling and finalizing my doctoral thesis. My (at the time) current placement as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Photonics in Glasgow was set up to support my work (and thesis writing) until Mar 31st. My goal was to complete the main body of thesis work before the end of March to ensure that I have sufficient mental bandwidth to partake in any potential carreer opportunities.
Little did I know back then that the whole process of thesis submission will take much longer than previously anticipated. While the writing process itself was going mostly well and quickly (primarily driven by my semi-anxious desire to have the thesis done as soon as possible), the process of obtaining feedback and making sure the thesis is checked and vetted took a rather long time. I have originally started writing my thesis in June 2022 and later in October, I have also started tracking my total page count (of the rendered TeX .pdf from Overleaf) on each day when I actively worked on the thesis draft. The evolution of the total page count can be seen below:
In the end, I have officially submitted my dissertation on Jun 30th, on the final day of a large photonics conference in Münich. My thesis defence (or viva voce, as it is called in the UK) took place in Glasgow on Sep 26th, and I have submitted the requested minor thesis corrections on Nov 22nd. I am currently waiting for an approval of the corrected thesis version, which will mark the final step of the whole degree awarding process.
I have entered 2023 as (primarily) a Ph.D. student in academia, and leave it with a full-time researcher position in the industry.
Early in January 2022, an opportunity has surfaced to join Hewlett Packard Labs (part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HPE in short) in Belgium as a full-time Research Scientist. The timing of the opportunity was perfect: the new contract would start immediately after my RA contract concluded in Glasgow. I ended up receiving the job offer and formally accepting it in February. Starting from April 1st, I have joined the Large-scale Integrated Photonics group within HPE Labs, with my new office located at the outskirts of Brussels in Diegem, Belgium. An interesting anecdote relating to the job opening was that it found its way to me on two rather different ocassions: during an announcement (by an invited keynote speaker) at IEEE IPC in November ‘22’ in Vancouver, and later through a headhunter on LinkedIn in December ‘22. (It certainly does pay off to have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile! :)
I am very happy with how things have turned out this year on the jobs front. Working for HPE means that I have realized my original aim of joining an industrial research lab, and I get to still pursue my main research interest topics of optical computing and neuromorphic photonics. I also get more opportunities to work with broader range of integrated (silicon) photonic architectures, advanced platforms and system-level focusing studies. We currently have multiple ongoing (and exciting) research projects such as NEUROPULS, and I am very much looking forward to where these projects will lead us.
I have entered the year as a twenty-something, and leave it as a thirty year old person.
“Thirty is the new twenty” was a phrase that seemed to echo through some of my friend circles as the people born in ‘93 (like myself) reached the end of their twenties this year. While the immediate effect of change in the leading numeral is negligible, I do feel my mindset slowly evolving (maturing?). The twenties were, in their own sense, quite a dynamic life period with relocations galore. Different countries, different cities, frequent new beginnings. While my joy of travelling is abiding and while I am very much looking forward to all the new journeys and adventures, I am also finding myself more frequently contemplating over the decisions for optimal long-term outcomes and stability. My feeling is that my move to Belgium might not have been the very final one - I am planning to stay for at least a couple years though, so let’s see what the future brings.
I have entered 2023 renting a single room in a shared flat with friends in Glasgow; and leave it living with my partner in our own flat in Schaerbeek, Belgium.
On various occasions, I have found myself thinking how the journey of doing a Ph.D. often prolongs the “student phase” of one’s life. I do not have a proper quantitative evidence supporting this observation, but I do believe that things such as having kids or flat-sharing are respectively less and more frequent among those who attend the grad school.
I personally have been flat-sharing all the way through my Ph.D. studies in Glasgow, with a group of very good friends. However, once I have joined HPE and moved to Brussels, it was clear that it was the right time to “step up the game” in terms of my housing situation. While flat-hunting in Brussels was somewhat challenging (nicer rental appartments in more popular areas such as Ixelles are subject to an overwhelming demand), the rental market was very dynamic with lots of opportunities consistently coming to (and leaving) the listings pages.
In the end, I grew quite fond of Josaphat Park in Schaerbeek, and decided that I want to live in its proximity. It took me more than a month of casual but consistent daily searching and messaging on Immoweb/Immovlan to finally succeed and get myself a rental agreement for a nice two-bedroom flat near Josaphat. The overall upgrade in terms of quality-of-life has been great, in particular thanks to now having a well defined divide between working (the office) and resting (living room, the bedroom).
P.S.: On the topic of sacrifices and struggles of people pursuing a Ph.D., I have really liked the following idea from an article by Tom Morgan: your present suffering is directly proportional to your future potential.
Recap of last year’s aims
Finish the PhD. ✅
Keep working on my shape. ✅ This one is was a success, although in a somewhat unexpected way. I’ve been using Xiaomi Body Composition 2 scale to track my body metrics during the cutting phase, only to find out in mid-April that the bodyfat % estimation on the Xiaomi model is wildly overestimated. As an example, a 21% b.f. ratio measured on Mi was estimated as a 11.7% b.f. ratio using a professional scale (Tanita). Quite a difference, don’t you think? Therefore, it seems I was in a better shape that I originally believed.
Get back into music production. ⛔ This one was a big flop, as I have not produced any new music in 2023. This was mainly due to the thesis completion process taking much longer to get completely through, as well as due to lots of the changing circumstances.
Publications
In terms of (first-authored) publications, this year presented a slowdown from the frantic publishing pace of the previous year (2022). First half of the year was mainly spent with work on my thesis (am I using the thesis as the ultimate excuse?), while the rest of the year I mainly focused on getting up-to-speed with work for HPE and wrapping up the writing process for previous research results.
I currently have a manuscript submitted (in review) based on my experimental work undertaken with the Lightwave Lab team at Princeton University (hopefully to be published in Q1 2024). I am also finalizing a manuscript on experiments with resonant tunnelling diodes for neuromorphic optoelectronics. Furthermore, I am currently pondering and exploring a new architecture idea for neuromorphic photonics that I am quite excited about. I am planning to finalize the preliminary exploration of this idea in the first months of 2024, and can’t wait to share it with the broader research community.
Learnings
Following on the topic of publications, one of the interesting things that I have learned about myself is that actually enjoy the process of pushing out research papers. When I was previously considering future career opportunities, I was primarily exploring options outside outside of academia, with certain non-research jobs being quite high on my list. In most of these, publishing would naturally not be a part of the workload - and while I do not require publishing to be happy with my work, I am very happy that my current job allows me (and encourages me) to partake in actively publishing our research results, despite the fact that we are a more industrially-aligned research lab.
Another thing that I have realized is that the sweet-spot for my thinking process is closer to a generalist (aproaching my work from a broader perspective) rather than a specialist (delving deep on a narrower research topic). Thinking in terms of scaled up architectures and systems that consists of functional “black boxes” is more enjoyable for me than exploring fine details of a single functional element. Basically, I enjoy building things with Lego bricks more than investigating individual bricks. :) For this reason, I also really enjoy multi-disciplinary research, as such type of research naturally lends itself to this type of thinking: combining distinct concepts from different fields, and (typically) accepting the trade-off of comparably lower depth of research. The same philosophy also applies during the music making process: I typically prefer starting from and tweaking pre-made presets and sounds and building songs from these, rather than always creating (synthesising) sounds from scratch.
One of my personal aims: I intend to focus more on trying to find a good balance between reading (or perhaps it could be called “information acquisition”) and writing (or creating in general). Sometimes it feels like my curiosity is insatiable, as I simply can’t resist reading absorbing new information: be it latest technical deep-dive blog posts about technology, scanning for new scientific papers of relevance, listening to news podcasts or following the updates on world (macro) events and their delicate intertwinings with the markets. All of these amount for vast amount of information, and my own knowledge garden in Logseq has been growing steadily over time. (I guess the broad scope of my curiosity goes hand in hand with my preference for the generalist approach mentioned above?) However, information acquisition is a lengthy, attention hungry process, and the amount of easily available information is nearly infinite, easily leading to over-saturation and overload of attention. I consider attention as one of the most scarce and precious resources in modern society (in agreement with the original attention economy thesis of Herbert A. Simon). Therefore, I want to more actively direct and conciously use my attention. Furthermore, there’s (typically) little use to information that is gathered/indexed but not put to action or shared with others. These can be summarized into two broad aims for the future: put the information that I am acquiring more frequently to use, and/or synthesize it and share it with others more frequently.
Furthermore, on the topics of information and data: I have spent this year consistently wearing Apple Watch Ultra (my first Watch), and it’s a great little gadget. I have learned that closing the Activity Rings can become a fun little obsession and gained lots of insight into the energy (calorie) budget of various sports and activites. Together with the practice of calorie tracking (sometimes abbreviated as CICO), this was instrumental in helping me learn and understand how much energy corresponds both to various foods and activities. The cool thing (in my opinion) is that after few months of CICO tracking, one develops an intuitive understanding for these numbers, and can maintain the energy balance even without having to meticulously track the numbers.
Media diet
My pick for the album of the year 2023 goes to Portugal. The Man for their latest LP named “Chris Black Saved My Life”. It’s been a long wait for a new album from P.TM since 2017’s album “Woodstock” (which was imo one of their weakest records). The anticipation for CBSVL was significant, and the album has delivered - it’s cohesive, has a story, and sonically delivers the band in my favourite style. There are many great songs on the record, but “Champ” stands out to me in particular.
For my favourite podcast discovery of the year, the choice goes to Red Web, a podcast focusing on mysteries of various kinds. Together with the two hosts Trevor and Alfredo, each episode delivers a thoroughly researched report on the circumstances and possible explanation theories on things unknown and unresolved. The hosts are really fun to listen to, and the podcast has quickly become a staple of my media diet.
And finally, my award for the favourite newsletter of the year goes to Kris Abdelmessih alias Moontower. Kris is an options trader with a knack for delivering an excellent newsletter at the boundary between markets and learnings about modern life/psychology/philosophy. You know that feeling when you read a text and can immediately feel (and appreciate) the intelligence of the author? Kris’ newsletter does that for me.
Looking forward to 2024
I am not a big fan of typical, new year resolutions - instead, I believe that development of new habits usually works better when approached in a shorter (=monthly) iterative cycle. Sticking to something for 30 days is both sufficiently short (to provide a feeling of the goal being attainable) and sufficiently long (to provide basic validation of the desired benefits). Therefore, instead of yearly goals, here are some broad areas that I’d like to focus on in 2024. I plan to use these as guidelines for setting my potential monthly goals:
Strenghtening my soft skills. This is coming both from the required skills for further career growth as well as from my own personal interest. After years of primarily focusing on technical skills (doing my Ph.D.), I’d like to further strenghten the “softer” skills such as leadership and project management.
Acquiring more hard skills. If there’s anything that the recent year has shown us, it is that (generative) AI/ML approaches have now reached both true ubiquity and remarkable capabilities. Thanks to both my curiosity about technology as well as due to my research focus, I have a decent understanding of common ML principles and theory. However, my practical ML skills are more lacking. This year, I have built a first custom pytorch NN model for one of our work projects, and I would very much to get much more serious about practical ML in 2024. Therefore, hands-on skills such as model building, parameter optimization, backtesting are on my list.
Connect and share more with people. Similarly to the previous year, connecting more and connecting better with people is something I really want to consciously focus on. Following on my previous thoughts on information acquisition vs. sharing, I’d like to shift my “information flow” balance more towards the outward direction. Truth is, I am a proponent of privacy and not the biggest fan of providing content on social media; I value humility, and dislike sharing things that could (in any way) be perceived as boasting. I have also always held an inner belief that sharing words with others should be justified, that words should be used carefully and thoughtfully, and with the intent to convey a message or feeling (all of these make it more challenging to write for others). At the same time, promoting oneself and one’s capabilities to people is essential for connecting to others and making an impact in our modern digital world. Therefore, finding the right balance in terms of sharing my work and life with others is something I want to put more work and focus on.
On the topic of “quantitative” (directly measurable) goals, I’d like to:
Get back to music production: finish a song. I have failed this in 2023, and want to try again. Hopefully, circumstances should be much more favourable for creating in 2024.
Write 6 blog posts per year. This is my practical goal for shifting the balance towards sharing information with the world. One of these will be my next yearly review, which means there should be at least 5 other posts in 12 months. That should be feasible.
Get back to regular book reading. This one is simple: try to shif the balance from reading only scientific papers, Twitter threads and blog posts to more books. Let’s aim for ~15 books per year, for the start?
Languages. Either further improve my Spanish or get a basic proficiency in French (ideally both).
And finally, one extra goal: make more video footage. This year, I have compiled a personal video recap from all the clips I have taken during the last 12 months, and have tremendously enjoyed both the process of creating the video as well as sharing it with my family. Therefore, I would like to focus on capturing more clips and videos for my next yearly video summary.