Leinweber Building, PhD milestones, colleagues' paper acceptances

2025 May 29
A sunset photo of downtown Ann Arbor before a thunderstorm; the buildings and the campus bell tower are lit bright orange, but the sky is cloudy and grey.

Hello! It's been getting warmer in Ann Arbor since I returned from Yokohama a few weeks ago. With warm spring temperatures comes budding leaves, blooming flowers, and the worst seasonal allergies I've dealt with in years -- I knew lingering by those pine trees was a bad idea! (╥﹏╥)

In research news:

Several of my colleagues' papers have been accepted to multiple conferences in the past few months. My friend F.R. Khan's work-in-progress has been accepted to the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2025 (aka DIS 2025) -- congratulations! ( ˶ˆᗜˆ˵ )

And an update to one of my earlier posts: three papers from our lab (including one that I helped co-author!) have been accepted to the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2025 (aka ACM FAccT 2025) -- congratulations to all authors of these works! ٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و

I wish I could travel to Greece for ACM FAccT 2025, but unfortunately cannot make it this year; I hope everyone else attending has a good time! ദ്ദി´ ˘ `)✧

In PhD news:

I'm just about ready to submit my pre-candidacy proposal, aka the first major milestone of my PhD program! Thinking about completing one of my PhD milestones feels so surreal -- the first year of my program sure flew by quickly, didn't it? Academia in the USA changed so much in that brief time... feels like a very different world from when my program began.

Also: the University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI) recently moved from the North Quad building in Central Campus to the new Leinweber Building in North Campus! The Leinweber Building is really nice, though they're still working on the finishing touches (the walls and hallways are very blank at the moment, so it's very easy to get lost looking for your office LOL).

A photograph of the Leinweber Building from the front entrance parking lot.
Several hand-drawn pictures of UMSI students taped to an office door

Though I miss our old downtown location, I appreciate the new facilities as well. Leinweber feels a little empty with so many faculty members and students out of town at the moment, but those of us here are doing our best to (quoting Ria Khan) "make this cage a house!" ( ◡̀_◡́)ᕤ

In personal news:

My friends and I visited the Toledo Museum of Art a few weeks ago, the Rachel Ruysch exhibit was amazing! It struck me at one point that the exhibit's paintings were all around 300 years old... I wonder if anyone will look at my art (or read my papers!) 300 years from now? (,,•o•,,)

A detailed still-life painting of multiple red, white, orange, and pink flowers in a vase against a black background.
A detailed still-life painting of vines, corn, apricots, and grapes arranged next to a bird's nest with small white eggs and various insects.

I also started playing Metaphor: ReFantazio a few weeks ago, and am really enjoying it! Metaphor's my first Atlus game (I've watched playthroughs of Persona 3/4/5 but never had consoles to play them on); while the learning curve was a little tough at first, I feel like I'm cruising pretty comfortably through the game now. It's hard to tell how far I am in the game though -- I'm about 20~25 hours in, but it still feels like I'm in the early game? Some folks have told me that an ordinary Metaphor playthrough can take upward to 100 hours to complete... we'll see how long my playthrough goes! ( • ̀ω•́ )✧