Update about.md

about.md

@@ -13,9 +13,9 @@ permalink: /about/
 - I'm a researcher, aspiring [boffin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boffin), [mango](https://github.com/kammitama5/kammitama5.github.io/blob/master/images/mango1.png) and cocoa picker. [Creative](https://kammitama5.github.io/Sunday-May-3rd/) and analytical thinker; I ran away from Hollywood (working for R&D facilities that facilitated [technical innovation for the movie industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Scientific_and_Technical_Award)) after a little more than a decade of working in that industry, and into science research; research seems to be a great blend of creativity, intellectual and analytical thinking, which suits me! Also note: my background before heading to the United States was in Physics, Maths and Art, and so, I had to learn everything about filmmaking from the ground up upon arriving in the United States, had never developed a single black and white roll of film before, in a class full of students who had since high school (1), and graduated at the top of my class in Undergrad.
 <!-- - [Here is my CV for linear thinkers: available upon request or see what I'm up to here](https://kammitama5.github.io/Tuesday-October-8th/). -->
 - [Here is my CV for linear thinkers](https://github.com/kammitama5/kammitama5.github.io/blob/master/images1/Krystal_Maughan_CV_55.pdf) or [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x0N2xUPdSj7vbe55mO_qTx_i2MtrFhUp/view?usp=sharing) and you can see what I'm up to [here i.e. "News"](https://kammitama5.github.io/Tuesday-October-8th/).
-- I am currently working on mathematical cryptography research, often as it relates to quantum computing. I regularly work at the intersection of the Number Theory community and the Quantum Computing (QC) community, which involves anything from working with post-quantum cryptography, quantum computational complexity, or general topics in arithmetic geometry / algebraic graph theory . Currently I am working on mathematical cryptography as it relates to quantum computing, co-advised by two professors; one in Pure Mathematics and the other in Computer Science (while being held hostage by the Pure Maths department at my University, much to my delight!). I am also working on other adjacent topics, too, such as classical error-correcting codes, quantum algorithms, and more broadly, computational arithmetic geometry / number theory and some graph theory projects relating to quantum (2).
-- You may have noticed that I have some history in AI. "An AI person!", you might say ("Isn't everyone these days?"). Until I publish in Mathematics (soon!), I am aware that this is what my profile shows because the cycle for publishing in AI is much shorter then my current area of research. I'd like to say that it would have been very easy (and quite lucrative; I could have had a glossy photo of myself with a link to my Ted Talk instead of that beach photo from Marin County!) for me to continue on a path with Generative AI, GPT, Transformers, etc, but I am more passionate about Pure Mathematics research, and its intersection with QC. I also really love the communities within Pure Mathematics and Quantum Computing and have felt that they invested in my success and in my being a good researcher in a way that I didn't think I was receiving via the AI community, which has issues with "researcher tokenism", as I like to call it (i.e. all researchers are not equal but also hey, we need "someone like you" today for our brochure / panel. In short, many aspects felt pretty exploitive (e.g. having a first-time submitter review papers with little to no mentorship because of the large number of submissions to conferences, so you want the labour of junior researchers without giving them much in return; in some cases not even acknowledging their work!), which is not surprising, given the complaints of the effects of these technologies by people who do not make them). So I seriously stopped coding any AI models around 2020, and I can hack things together, but I am *really* rusty. In 2021 and 2022, I cut my teeth learning Pure Mathematics grad school foundational classes (e.g. I took Abstract Algebra I, III in the same semester and it kicked my butt, as well as Graph Theory and Spectral Graph Theory at the same time another semester!), and around that time, I started working on some projects, only seriously digging in around Fall 2022 (Pure Maths research can be *very* intidimidating because in comparison to AI, you're not "starting with a dataset" typically. And it is a slower, iterative process!). All is not lost; my background in AI has served me well in the Pure Maths community, too, but I enjoy problems at the intersection of Pure Maths and QC primarily very much! I work mainly with [Sage](https://www.sagemath.org/) these days, LaTeX, and mechanical pencils on paper. That being said, I've been *flooded* with kindness by the QC and Pure Maths communities, and so I am *really* very busy working with several groups on several projects (about 8-10 in 2023 alone which are wip)! So much so that I've missed recruitment emails that were sent nine months ago in 2023!
-- You will find me mostly in the Pure Maths lab; I was given a desk since I am working with professors in Graph Theory and Number Theory. I'm working with several mathematicians on projects at the moment (and most recently, some physicists!), as well as learning Lean 3 (Summer 23) with a logician. I've really enjoyed the jump into Quantum, but I do realize that I also have a lot to learn (and that I have to work my way up, while say, continuing in AI would mean that I would have had my pick in opportunities to some extent, and certainly would have been finished with grad school by now!). I don't see this as a disadvantage (see (1) and (2) about my background), as if you've been reading this far, you know that by definition one of my *strengths* is working my way up to the top of any discipline / area of interest I set my mind towards, and it is, in fact, expected of many long-term career researchers (the criteria is often "is the question interesting" rather than "this is a thing in my field", and one learns to learn in research). Meanwhile, my appetite for learning more Pure Mathematics and my core community in general is that of the Pure Mathematics community (in particular, the Number Theory community), and I would say at this point I think more like a Mathematician, but I was told this in past internships (even before grad school!), and have a tendency to get hired by Mathematicians (so if that mindset is what your team might enjoy, it's something to consider!). What this means is also that I find the kinds of problems that mathematicians would enjoy to be enjoyable, too (that's generally a good metric to also figure out where one "belongs" in research). I invest a lot of time and share resources within any community that is my core, as I think it's an important part of sustaining its longevity.
+- I am currently working on mathematical cryptography research, often as it relates to quantum computing. I regularly work at the intersection of the Number Theory community and the Quantum Computing (QC) community, which involves anything from working with post-quantum cryptography, quantum computational complexity, or general topics in arithmetic geometry / algebraic graph theory . Currently I am working on mathematical cryptography as it relates to quantum computing, co-advised by two professors; one in Pure Mathematics and the other in Computer Science (while being held hostage by the Pure Maths department at my University, much to my delight!). I am also working on other adjacent topics, too, such as classical error-correcting codes, quantum algorithms, and more broadly, computational arithmetic geometry / number theory and some graph theory projects relating to quantum (2), and in my spare time, I continue a budding love interest in building SAT solvers in Lean.
+- You may have noticed that I have some history in AI. "An AI person!", you might say ("Isn't everyone these days?"). Until I publish in Mathematics (soon!), I am aware that this is what my profile shows because the cycle for publishing in AI is much shorter then my current area of research. I'd like to say that it would have been very easy (and quite lucrative; I could have had a glossy photo of myself with a link to my Ted Talk instead of that beach photo from Marin County!) for me to continue on a path with Generative AI, GPT, Transformers, etc, but I am more passionate about Pure Mathematics research, and its intersection with QC. I also really love the communities within Pure Mathematics and Quantum Computing and have felt that they invested in my success and in my being a good researcher in a way that I didn't think I was receiving via the AI community, which has issues with "researcher tokenism", as I like to call it (i.e. all researchers are not equal but also hey, we need "someone like you" today for our brochure / panel. In short, many aspects felt pretty exploitive (e.g. having a first-time submitter review papers with little to no mentorship because of the large number of submissions to conferences, so you want the labour of junior researchers without giving them much in return; in some cases not even acknowledging their work!), which is not surprising, given the complaints of the effects of these technologies by people who do not make them). So I seriously stopped coding any AI models around 2020, and I can hack things together, but I am *really* rusty. In 2021 and 2022, I cut my teeth learning Pure Mathematics grad school foundational classes (e.g. I took Abstract Algebra I, III in the same semester and it kicked my butt, as well as Graph Theory and Spectral Graph Theory at the same time another semester!), and around that time, I started working on some projects, only seriously digging in around Fall 2022 (Pure Maths research can be *very* intidimidating because in comparison to AI, you're not "starting with a dataset" typically. And it is a slower, iterative process!). All is not lost; my background in AI has served me well in the Pure Maths community, too, but I enjoy problems at the intersection of Pure Maths and QC primarily very much! I work mainly with [Sage](https://www.sagemath.org/) these days, LaTeX, and mechanical pencils on paper and most recently, Lean. That being said, I've been *flooded* with kindness by the QC and Pure Maths communities, and so I am *really* very busy working with several groups on several projects (about 8-10 in 2023 alone which are wip)! So much so that I've missed recruitment emails that were sent nine months ago in 2023!
+- You will find me mostly in the Pure Maths lab; I was given a desk since I am working with professors in Graph Theory and Number Theory. I'm working with several mathematicians on projects at the moment (and most recently, some physicists!), as well as learning Lean 3 (Summer 23) with a logician and making SAT solvers (a recent fascination of mine that stemmed from an internship I did in 2022!). I've really enjoyed the jump into Quantum, but I do realize that I also have a lot to learn (and that I have to work my way up, while say, continuing in AI would mean that I would have had my pick in opportunities to some extent, and certainly would have been finished with grad school by now!). I don't see this as a disadvantage (see (1) and (2) about my background), as if you've been reading this far, you know that by definition one of my *strengths* is working my way up to the top of any discipline / area of interest I set my mind towards, and it is, in fact, expected of many long-term career researchers (the criteria is often "is the question interesting" rather than "this is a thing in my field", and one learns to learn in research). Meanwhile, my appetite for learning more Pure Mathematics and my core community in general is that of the Pure Mathematics community (in particular, the Number Theory community), and I would say at this point I think more like a Mathematician, but I was told this in past internships (even before grad school!), and have a tendency to get hired by Mathematicians (so if that mindset is what your team might enjoy, it's something to consider!). What this means is also that I find the kinds of problems that mathematicians would enjoy to be enjoyable, too (that's generally a good metric to also figure out where one "belongs" in research). I invest a lot of time and share resources within any community that is my core, as I think it's an important part of sustaining its longevity.
 <!-- - [Here is my (longer and more realistic) CV / Curriculum Vitae](https://github.com/kammitama5/kammitama5.github.io/blob/master/images1/Krystal_Maughan_CV_4_11_2023a.pdf).  -->
 <!-- - 
 In the past, I've also done research at the intersection of Provable Fairness, Differential Privacy / Trustworthy AI (having produced 4 papers, 2 of which we presented at peer-reviewed workshops), but I am not an expert in state-of-the-art AI technologies involving LLMs or Transformers (Sorry!). I do occasional DEI things for the AI community (I personally do not prefer the term "DEI", but rather I am on the committees of "not everyone has generational wealth in Academia" teams, and how to facilitate that systemically in practice so more people have access and opportunity to consider academia / have a pipeline to that), but I am not really affiliated with them in terms of fundamental research (sometimes someone will ask me to collaborate, but it's not my main area of research), and will fall asleep in most AI lectures. You can say my interest in Machine Learning in general intersects with critical, trusted systems moreso than aiming for tell-tale signs of improved iterative, incremental accuracy or data-crunching. I'm also interested in mathematical problems within Machine Learning (such as abstractions of problems that might require data e.g. information theory, compression, constraints, etc), if they are interesting.