I’m running out of time for a 2025 post, and thought I’d share some statues of the year. You can try to guess the locations, I’ll put the solution at the bottom.

I attended my first UCR graduation – for my former student Xianghao Kong who is now at an AI startup called Voia. I went to a few conferences this year, including NeurIPS where I had a lot of fun conversations but forgot to take any pictures.

For research, I started a new direction in 2025 and I hope we get to show some results from this in 2026. LLMs and diffusion models generate “information” in some fixed path (one word at a time, or denoise all pixels by a fixed amount each step). Is it possible to discover your own path?

Personally, I started dabbling with chess again after not playing for many years. I’m not sure I have enough spare brain cells to get in good form, but I’ve enjoyed following the drama in the world chess scene – this must be what it is like to be a sports fan.

Solutions: UCR bear is in the middle of our campus. There are two from the Allerton conference at UIUC, the mammoth and Lincoln. The bearded waving guy is in Laguna beach – they have a history of this explained by the plaque (and an actual person who carries on the tradition by waving to everybody). The Kiss of Death is in a cemetery in Barcelona. The newspaper statue is in Culver City, I’m not sure the story, I was just biding time before a nice dinner with former students and colleagues. Godzilla is from Tokyo of course. The log is a “caga tio”, a delightful Christmas tradition from the Catalans in Barcelona. The guy with a bird on his shoulder is from a restaurant near Los Alamos, I’m fondly remembering a fun dinner there.