This is my blog, where I have written over 300 articles on a variety of topics. Recent posts tend to focus on computer science, my area of specialty as a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley.
I spent roughly a year preparing, and then interviewing, for tenure-track faculty positions. My job search is finally done, and I am joining the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department, starting in August 2023. I am now scrambling to get started, to find housing, etc. In case you are interested, I have documented my faculty application story…
At the end of every year I have a tradition where I write summaries of the books that I read throughout the year. Unfortunately this year was exceptionally busy (the postdoc life is a lot more intense than the PhD life) so I didn’t write summaries. I apologize in adevance. You can find the other book-related blog posts from prior years (going back to 2016) in the blog archives. Here are the 17…
The airplanes on display at the CoRL 2022 banquet. At the end of my last post which belatedly summarized RSS 2022, I mentioned I was also attending CoRL 2022 in a much farther away city: Auckland, New Zealand. That conference has now concluded and I thought it went well. I attended CoRL for a few reasons. I was presenting our recent ToolFlowNet paper , which is one of the major projects that I…
A photo I took while at RSS 2022 in New York City, on the dinner cruise arranged by the conference. From June 27 to July 01 this year, I attended the latest the Robotics: Science and Systems conference . This was the first in-person RSS after two virtual editions in 2020 and 2021. I don’t publish in RSS frequently. I only have one RSS paper, VisuoSpatial Foresight , from 2020. I was attending…
A photo I took while at ICRA 2022 in Philadelphia. This is the "Grand Hall" area where we had the conference reception. There are a lot of (more professional) photos on the conference website. At long last, after more than two years of virtual conferences, last May I attended an in-person conference, the 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), from May 23-27. The last…
The system for our IROS 2022 paper on singulating layers of cloth with tactile sensing. In collaboration with my colleagues at Berkeley and CMU, we recently uploaded two papers to arXiv on robotic fabric manipulation: Efficiently Learning Single-Arm Fling Motions to Smooth Garments , for ISRR 2022 . Learning to Singulate Layers of Cloth using Tactile Feedback , for IROS 2022 . Robotic fabric (or…
Scott Aaronson is a professor of computer science at UT Austin, where his research area is in theoretical computer science. However, he may be more well known in the broader computer science community for his popular blog Shtetl Optimized , which he began in 2005 and still updates regularly. I found his blog back in the early 2010s when I started my journey into computer science, and I was hooked…
UPDATE (July 2026): this post is no longer updated. Please check out my newer paper reviewing document available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_ZNxaV1hzxIVyBISYy5iJrkH3eqF2ofKUh46XBKR4oo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.a67d7d6kf15j In academia, for better or worse, we have what’s called a peer review system, where papers get accepted to journals, conferences, or other venues on the basis of…
I stand with Ukraine and firmly oppose Vladimir Putin’s invasion. If someone were to counter and ask me with “ What about when $X$ did this awful thing? ”, I would urge that person to consider the direct human suffering of the current attack. Is the current invasion justified by any means? And yes, I would also oppose similar military invasions against other countries, governments, and people –…
At the end of every year I have a tradition where I write summaries of the books that I read throughout the year. Here’s the following post with the rough set of categories: Popular Science (6 books) History, Government, Politics, Economics (6 books) Biographies / Memoirs (5 books) China (5 books) COVID-19 (2 books) Miscellaneous (7 books) I read 31 books this year. You can find the other blog…