ProgressReport 7 November 2025

The last progress report was a month ago. I might try to do these every month from now on, see if I like this cadence better.

Habits have all been good. Lots of good hoops and BJJ. Did a conference and some social events, all with no booze. I got labs taken after going on a statin, the results improved as expected, but I was hoping for more. I learned that non-filtered coffee can be a source of high cholesterol, so I have now moved to drip. Reading has been strong. I have started reading the Feynman lectures. I also recently found some great AI/ML tutorials from Andrej Karpathy. I will definitely do some deep dives into these, they are right up my alley. I did the AAVE loan and am in the final stretch of the mortgage, only waiting on the insurance.

Some good news. Chuyuan defended his thesis! Another major milestone. He did a solid job on the document and the presentation was good. I need to make sure he lands well. AE got the distinguished researcher award! This is great for both of us. It will get him a foot in the door with upgrades and strengthen the collaborations between CMU and the CAF.

Most of my work was preparing an experimental hot topics talk for Higgs 2025 at Brown. My talk went well and the conference was a good chance to meet people on CMS (Michele Selvaggi / Marko / Greg Landsberg / Chris Madrid). The Run2 HH->4b was made public and AE gave a nice talk on experimental methods that highlighted systematics from synthetic datasets.

On the HGC side, the thermal chamber has arrived and we are now close to having everything needed for the MMTS. Still no baseplates, but more are finally now on their way.

I gave an AI pitch to Barb in faculty meeting. Hopefully this spurs some movement in the AI for science front.

Finally, I've been writting lots of rec letters: Alejandro, Christian, and Arvind. This is getting smoother.