Short Openings
2024 has been a very dramatic year in this world, as I don’t have to mention too much since everybody already knows. So here, I am not gonna express my personal opinions on world-events too much, even though I have already talked about them via offline chats with many of my friends and acquintances.
This post will be only me reviewing myself — aka, an overall personal assessment. Of course, as I write here, I have just begun my thoughts about this, so this will also not be a very nice-looking, fully-polished article: It will look a bit random, messy and chaotic, although I will try my best to keep the degree of randomness, messiness, and chaos “a little bit”.
Going through my personal notion
Below are some achievements I am thankful for all people helping me, including my colleagues, friends and all collaborators — without you guys, none of this would happen.
Publish 3 papers. The first paper is actually last year’s work about spoof-aware speaker verification [1], which actually went through multiple rounds of reviews over a year. I guess it’s because I submitted it in not a good timing, in order to give a full period (or exclamation point? LOL) for my PhD. It is actually the last paper of my thesis and I glad it works. Other 2 papers are more solely about anti-spoofing [2][3].
Build consistent collaborations with external groups and friends. Some of my other publications have partially noted this one (Please check my scholar profile for details, although I really don’t do this frequently). I think I have been going a bit harder than before this year about it, as it is an essential for academics. In particular, shout out to my boss and the amazing exchaning students in my research group, who have made this happen and I hope I have not disappointed you guys. But somehow I found I have been a bit losing my focus: my collaboration covers quite wide range, but failed to drop something for real — Well, I’m not even sure if that’s what I’m really chasing, since I believe those big moves should come naturally, not forced. We’ll see how it plays out next year.
Seriously start side hobby works. I have been involved in some secret projects and spending quite a loads of off-work time about it. I gotta say if we wanna get into some active communication and make projects actively with people, man, it’s gotta be Tokyo. It definitely is. This year I have been in so many meeting-up places in Tokyo and I have met so many amazing developers and builders. This really raised my interest about new thigns and technologies. They were also the place where those secret projects have been triggered. So we’ll see you at 2025, where we will be revealing the details of those.
Finish a full marathon — The 19th Shonan International Marathon . Woo! If I have to pick one real life-time achievement this year, man it’s gotta be this one. Even though I can run 20km in a very calm and peaceful manner, when it comes to this challenge, I still really wondered if I can do it without falling off. Luckily I made it.
There was an interesting story, as one of many during that 5 hours: the route of the full marathon was a back-and-forth on an autobahn and the starting/ending point was at a hillock. It was around 35km point where we saw the ending point and people began to shout “Finally!”. But when we reached what we saw, it was only ~37km done — we still had to run a 5km back-and-forth loop. I was mentally broken and walked for 2km for real, couldn’t stop swearing in both English and Japanese. But then I heard people’s cheering, and most critically, thanks to a couple’s padding my shoulder and smiles (shout out to them since they were runners as well!), I kept going up and finished (somehow I actually could still accelerate. Human body, so damn amazing!).
I really learned a lot during the whole marathon, but the most important thing I learned is — We need sparks from outside when we fail. We need people to cheer us up when we are broken. Look for those sparks, look for people and shout your frustration out, and move on with those energies. In such case, I can tell marathon is a team sport — a team of thousands of people reaching one single goal!
Of course, even though I am not a guy who likes setting goals, but now when I’m thinking about this, there are couple things I really, really wanna achieve next year.
Master Japanese (Sorry boss! I know I should achieve this). I don’t wanna make excuse about this, but after I arrived JP last year, my life has been full of new challenges and more importantly, uncertainties: Is Japan truly where I want to put down roots? Does really engaged in JP life something totally different from initial impression? What if I can no longer live in Tokyo but have to move to somewhere countryside? Can I indulge it? Now when I look at these questions, Looking at these questions now, I realize that truly learning Japanese communication isn’t just about making daily life smoother — it’s about finding real answers to these questions.
Build muscles. Even though I can blame this to running too much, I know I really can’t. So I’ll see y’all next year in the gym at 7!
Things that are not covered in notion
…..but more important from life perspective.
The best achievement I have this year is to be a better team player, not only in work but also in sports. In the work, I think there have been quite a tough period where I actually made a lot of mistakes due to mis-communications, and I believe those costed me a lot. But thanks to those, I believe I begin to find a nice-working paradigm with my group mates, which will lead us to a much better and more productive 2025. In terms of sports, I have been involved in both basketball and football friendly groups and met a lot of people — you guys have been amazing and a big Happy New Year to all of you!
I am 30 now. As a guy who likes to compete on ball sports, I am pretty old. Moreover, I have finished a full marathon, which somehow transcribed my body working mechanism, especially legs. Like I said above, I think I have learned a lot during those trascriptions. In basketball, I know I cannot rely on my speed and explosiveness forever, so I gradually trascribed myself to a 3-D player like DFS — no ball handling, a role-player, stick with the area and be active on defense, but shoot hard-core shots whenever feeling it. Football is another thing I’ve recapped and I hopefully have become a more…..normally-behaving man on the field XD. I know I have no skills but I can run a lot, so I hope doing those dirty works will make my teammates happy.
But most importantly, as a 30-year-old, even though mentally I guess I still am a boy (on pitches and courts we are still being called ``boys" a lot lol), When getting practical, I know I gotta be more like a man — be more patience, do things slow, take responsibilities, and know where to reply on when feeling down. I’ll take these to the 1st year of my 30s, and see where I will be at.
Little bit other thoughts….Just a little bit
Neutralness. Apart from above, this has been a year where I have been really settled and fully embraced the peacefulness of a particular city. No matter how noisy outside world is, no matter how optimistic or pessimistic people are concerned, my mind has been quite neutral always. Somehow I found that as this world is going more and more conservative and polarized, neutralness becomes more like a precious property.
Lost. This year this most frequent question that I have been asked is “where you gonna settle yourself?”. As indicated from above, I still don’t know. Having been in many places during these years, I think this question will at least still be with me for another 2 or 3 years, even though for people who keep bothering me with this question: you don’t know how much I wanna have this answer myself. But again, I believe things will come by nature and I will keep holding my vibe to it.
With that being said, this is the end of this rough, hectic, but hopefully interesting year in reivew 2024. Again, I’m not a guy who likes to set goals (apart from something really serious like the two above), so we’ll get into 2025 without any burden, and with our minds crystal clear. I hope you’re with me on this if you manage to read through this cozy post and reach here.
Sign off 2024.
UNDERDOG
2024-12-30
Tokyo, 0C, Sunny
References
[1] Generalizing Speaker Verification for Spoof Awareness in the Embedding Space , Xuechen Liu, Md Sahidullah, Kong Aik Lee, and Tomi Kinnunen, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2024.
[2] A Preliminary Case Study on Long-Form In-the-Wild Audio Spoofing Detection , Xuechen Liu, Xin Wang, and Junichi Yamagishi, IEEE BIOSIG 2024, Darmstadt, Germany.
[3] Explaining Speaker and Spoof Embeddings via Probing , Xuechen Liu, Junichi Yamagishi, Md Sahidullah, and Tomi Kinnunen, IEEE ICASSP 2025, Hyderabad, India.