a blog about research, art and life 💋

Think I’ve kind of learned that the more authentic and genuine it is, the better it will work for you.

Match Day happens on the third Friday in March (March 21, 2025, in this year’s case). On Monday of that week, students learn whether they’ve matched with a residency program but they don’t yet find out where they have matched. This Match status notification is sent by email at 10am ET on Monday. (Students who do not match by Monday may apply for supplemental offers that concludes on Thursday, the day prior to Match Day....

Facebook’s former Director of Public Policy Sarah Wynn-Williams published a memoir about her experience working at Facebook (Meta). The book is titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism. The book is officially published on March 11, 2025. On the day of the book’s publication, Meta filed an arbitration demand. Just a day later, the book is ‘banned’—arbitrator temporarily ordered Sarah not to make any “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” related to Meta and to stop promoting the book....

Here are two interesting articles I came across, about the ballet choreographer George Balanchine: How Balanchine saw the music and heard the dance Tchaikovsky and Balanchine: Partners in Dance Balanchine’s choreography is great with musicality. His love for Tchaikovsky well explains this. (Note: Ballenchine borns 10 years after Tchaikovsky passed away). For Balanchine, the process of creating ballets to Tchaikovsky’s music was like learning from a beloved mentor. “Without Tchaikovsky’s help, I would not have managed… I’m not smart enough for it....

Pas de deux is a dance duet in which two (typically male + female) dancers perform ballet step together. A strictly classical balletic pas de deux follows a fixed pattern: a supported adagio, a solo male variation, a solo female variation, and the final flashy coda. The Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux is interesting for its music origin. The music is composed by Tchaikovsky, obviously. But actually it’s part of Swan Lake....

I’m TAing Discrete Math for Professor Nick Gravin this semester (2025 Spring). We’ve introduced extra problems—a set of challenging bonus questions that provides extra credits, meant for students who find the regular coursework too easy. The goal is to provide meaningful enrichment, but we’ve encountered a mechanism design problem: How do we structure rules and incentives so that students put in genuine effort, avoid academic dishonesty where they copy from each other to get scores, and maintain fairness in the grading process?...

Professor Shang-Hua Teng from USC is visiting our institute (ITCS@SUFE) today. A distinguished mathematician and theoretical computer scientist, Professor Teng shared valuable career insights during an open panel discussion. Later, he delivered a talk on his recent work, Regularization and Optimal Multiclass Learning, co-authored with Julian Asilis, Siddartha Devic, Shaddin Dughmi, and Vatsal Sharan, and presented at the Thirty-Seventh Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2024. Professor Teng and my advisor met at Tsinghua almost 20 years ago and remain close collaborators and friends since then....

At the end of my USC PhD open day visit, I went to Frank Lévy’s concert “An Hour With Rachmaninoff” at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford. Professor Lévy commented on Rachmaninoff’s nostalgia. Rachmaninoff’s deep nostalgia was largely due to his forced exile from Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Before the revolution, Rachmaninoff was already a major composer, pianist, and conductor in Russia. He had a beautiful estate called Ivanovka, where he composed much of his early music, surrounded by the rolling Russian countryside that he loved....

I was on a flight back to Shanghai when I read an article about Rose (from BlackPink) and her new song, “APT,” featuring Bruno Mars. I was smitten after a single listen. The sound was mesmerizing. After first hearing the song, I found myself humming the chorus wherever I went. I was hardly the only one. Presumably, a considerable number of readers are still captive to that spell. You know the chorus I’m talking about: a-pa-teu, a-pa-teu, a-pa-teu, a-pa-teu…...

I used to be really into modern art—especially the 1960s—when I was in high school. Teenagers tend to distance themselves from their own culture or from whatever’s popular, I guess so they can feel “iconic.” Honestly, I was just being avant-garde for the sake of avant-garde: hanging up a Marilyn Monroe print in my bedroom, thinking it was cool that none of my friends got it (not that I fully did, either, as I later realized)....