Annual Summary for 2024

2024 marks an important year in my PhD journey, filled with new experiences unlike any before. Right now, I’m incredibly busy working on my dissertation, but tonight, these memories hit me all at once, and I feel it’s the right time to write them down.

1. Research Works

Slide-level pathology vision-language pretraining and Spatial Transcriptomics defined my research in 2024. Unfortunately, the former didn’t go as planned and remains on my to-do list. The latter, after being rejected by IJCAI and NeurIPS (the rejected version was later used for a patent application, which is still valid), finally found success at AAAI. Overall, this year brought me one TMI journal paper (an extended version of my previous conference paper) and an AAAI conference paper.

2. Romantic Relationship

The first half of the year revolved around a girl from the medical school at my university. Three times a week, I biked across Xihu District to meet her at her rented apartment. At first, it was exciting—I cooked meals, had an amazing birthday (with a drone!), and even traveled with her to another city. But looking back, I barely remember doing anything else during that time. Who knows? In the end, it didn’t work out.

3. Traveling with Old Friends

Somehow, I ended up traveling a lot in the second half of 2024. During the summer, I took solo trips to various cities in Zhejiang, renting the cheapest cars I could find. It was a refreshing experience—being alone in an unfamiliar place forces you to seek out new kinds of joy.

I also went mountain camping with a colleague, but we picked a terrible night—strong winds and rain made it nearly impossible to sleep. My friend couldn’t take it and decided to hike down around 8 PM to sleep in the car, which, in hindsight, was the right call. Despite the struggle, the experience was unforgettable, and cooking in a tent was simply awesome!

Beyond that, I traveled with old friends in Beijing. We visited Jeju in the summer and ventured to the Russian Far East in October, where I hiked a lot and captured many beautiful photos. More recently, I went to Yunnan with my siblings for a hike in Tiger Leaping Gorge. It’s a shame that the U.S. Consulate General had major issues with my travel visa—otherwise, I might be exploring the East Coast right now!