December 14, 2024

Dear Friend,

Merry XMAS!

It has been a busy year. May 18, I attended Caltech Seminar Day with my brother Jerry. Jerry and I listened to Beckman Auditorium speakers and enjoyed lunch in Beckman mall with music. We also visited the Biophotonics Lab’s Ptychographic microscopy room, imaging chicken eggs and blood flow with lasers. Oct 19, I attended my niece’s yacht wedding in Newport Beach. I had brunch with nephew Stephen the next day.

Sept 29 - Oct 7, I took part in COSTSAVERTOUR.COM's Best of the Balkans Tour. The Balkans tour visited Dubrovnik, Kotor, Budva, Sarajevo, and Split in countries Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia.

I attended ACT plays, SFPH plays, SF Opera, and Broadway SF: Big Data, Sweatshop Overlord, Strange Loop, My Home on the Moon, 39 Steps, Glass Menagerie, Evita, Play that Goes Wrong, Magic Flute, Innocense, Partenope, Tristan and Isolde, Carmen, Hairspray, Funny Girl, and Wicked. I also attended Santana’s music concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater.

I attended monthly Caltech Alumni Assoc. meetings including: Second Kind of Impossible (Quasicrystals), Building and Selling Life Science, Physics-based Animation at Pixar, Decarbonizing Aviation, Portable DNA Printer, Human Phenome Initiative, Moving Protons and Electrons, Decarbonization of Energy Systems.

Mar 18-21, I attended NVIDIA GTC 2024, the "Woodstock of AI" at the San Jose Convention Center. I also attended AI DevSummit, Snowflake Dev Day, and Dev Innovation Summit at various SF Bay Area convention centers. I wrote an LLM (Large Language Models) survey paper called LLMs for Malware Offense and Defense.

I created a Pronouns, Second Edition update to my 1980 Caltech M.S. thesis in the forms of a prettier LaTeX-updated document and Python code implementation in my GitHub repo Pronouns2. I continued playing with the Lean 4 theorem prover, doing many Lean 4 exercises in Lean 4’s mathematics_in_lean. I’ve developed an almost finished Emin text editor for macOS. I continue to collaborate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet to accelerate my software development work. ChatGPT 4o and I have also authored some 350-word Sci-Fi short stories with cover art on the side, this year.

That’s the news, folks.

Merry XMAS to all my friends and family!

Kelly Roach