It is a great honor to attend the Anglo-German research workshop program at the University of Oxford. The program is generously funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, and the scholarship fully covers accommodation and meals for the entire week. Exploring the boundaries of AI and creativity with scholars from diverse backgrounds in such an academic atmosphere is incredibly exciting!

As a wonderful coincidence, Oxford is also where my supervisor Meng Wang completed his studies, so I am looking forward to taking this chance to wander around the campus he once knew.

Four days at the VeTSS Summer School in Exeter. I really enjoyed the talks, and huge thanks to the organisers for putting together such a thoughtfully prepared programme. An unforgettable week.

What I will remember most are the smaller moments. Our first evening at the pub by the river, where a dozen or so of us ended up talking until midnight. And one lunch when the first-year women PhDs went out for pizza together and spent hours drifting between the future, our research, and funding.

Beyond the programme, three moments from the week that reminded me how small the academic world really is. First, I ran into Rachel Muir, the same person I had first met at PLISS in Bertinoro only weeks earlier: two summer schools in one summer, at opposite ends of Europe, with the same friend. She had her car with her and drove us back to the accommodation, which felt more like a reunion than a coincidence. Second, I met Wenlin (Winnie) Yi from Imperial College, a Chinese PhD student whose English name is almost identical to mine, Wenlin vs Weilin; different characters, similar but not identical pronunciation. Third, I got talking to a PhD student of Daniel Kroening (AWS), and it turned out that Daniel was the same person I had just had dinner with in Lisbon at FLoC only days earlier, together with my supervisor Cristina David and Arindam Sharma. Daniel has collaborated with Cristina since her Oxford years, and Mirco Giacobbe (Birmingham) was Daniel's postdoc at Oxford during that same period. What at first felt like a chance meeting was really a shared academic lineage I had simply never traced. This community is small, and full of the kind of links you only notice once they surface.

Attended FLoC 2026 (CAV) in Lisbon.

My favourite talk was Işıl Dillig's (UT Austin) Trustworthy Neuro-Symbolic Programming with Informal Specifications, on treating learning-enabled systems as programs that compose symbolic structure with learned neural primitives, and on how to earn trust in them when the specification is only informal.

Two things made it stand out. The first is simply that it was exciting to see a senior researcher of that calibre working so close to my own problem. The second is that it gave me a sharper way to frame that problem. Her motivating failure was a correct program being discarded because a neural primitive misclassified a single input: uncertainty in perception silently contaminating a judgement about the program. My own work sits on the mirror image of that failure, an incorrect program being accepted because independently sampled candidates all agree with one another. Her response (pruning a program only when the user's answer falls outside its conformal output set, which bounds the chance of discarding the program they actually wanted, with a must-be-true / may-be-true abstraction keeping this tractable instead of enumerating possible worlds) is a far more principled treatment of the same underlying issue than the thresholding we currently rely on. I wanted to photograph almost every slide, and did.

Dinner in Lisbon with my supervisor Cristina David, Arindam Sharma, and Daniel Kroening (AWS), whose PhD student I would run into at VeTSS in Exeter a few days later, without knowing the connection.

Joined the University of Bristol's Interdisciplinary Catalyst Sandpit for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Our team's proposal for a platform to teach, personalize, and safely share skills for robot companions won £1,000.

Attended the 8th PLISS (Programming Language Implementation Summer School) in Bertinoro, Italy for one week. The underlying implementation of programming languages and state space exploration are areas of deep interest to me, and it was a great chance to learn cutting-edge PL techniques and meet like-minded researchers.

Beyond listening to the PL heavyweights on stage, the most important part of this summer was going out for gelato together with everyone. Somehow the daily ice-cream runs in Bertinoro turned out to be where some of the best conversations and friendships happened. More memories from the week are in this shared photo album.

Honoured to serve as a reviewer at the University of Bristol for the Spärck AI Scholarship.

The Wise Software Engineering Lab from Tianjin University, led by Prof. Junjie Chen, visited the University of Bristol, and I had the pleasure of taking part in their visit.

During the visit, I had the privilege of listening to a talk by Prof. Yingquan Zhao, an Associate Professor at the College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, on his recent work in JVM testing. We had a wonderful discussion exploring the transferability of his methods to my current research direction on code generation, from which I benefited greatly.

Beyond the academic sessions, we took a trip together to one of Bristol's most iconic landmarks, the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The weather was absolutely lovely, and walking across Brunel's masterpiece together made for a memorable afternoon. Beyond the research exchanges, we also chatted about everyday life, and everyone was humorous and easy-going, which made the whole experience genuinely enjoyable. Truly a delightful time!

Today officially marks the completion of my Research Assistant role in the project Exploring Barriers to AI Doctoral Studies, funded by EPSRC. I have experienced the challenges and charm of interdisciplinary research. Collaborating with people from various countries and gaining my first in-depth understanding of the UK's AI PhD education system gave me quite a bit of culture shock. A huge thank you to everyone in our project team for their hard work and dedication!

It felt incredibly magical that my first visiting exchange as a PhD student was returning to my alma mater, Tianjin University, to visit The Wise Software Engineering Lab from Tianjin University. I even arrived a few hours early that day to study at the Zhengdong Library, a place I frequented during my undergraduate years.

Surprisingly, the new campus has added many new shops and stores, truly proving the joke that "the school always renovates right after you graduate." Besides that, the students in Prof. Junjie Chen's group are all very impressive and welcoming. I hope we can have more exchanges in the future!

A new beginning! Today I officially joined the PLRG (Programming Languages Research Group) lab family, starting my PhD journey. Transitioning into the deep waters of computer science, I feel excited facing unknown challenges. Keep coding, keep researching!

The picture is from our group's Christmas party, my very first official Christmas party in the UK, and it was a lot of fun. I can truly feel how wonderful and friendly everyone in our group is, especially my two supervisors. There are even two (perhaps more) members currently learning Chinese, which is quite cute. Worth mentioning is a big thanks to our well-funded lab for treating me to such a great meal! I was a bit too shy to take photos of the food that day, but it was absolutely delicious!!!

I love doing a PhD. I am absolutely certain of this right now.

Participating in the 3+1 AMD Programmes made 2025 a chaotic yet extraordinarily fulfilling year. Thanks to this program, I completed all my undergraduate credits within the first three years, and successfully managed my master's studies alongside writing both my bachelor's and master's dissertations in the fourth year. It was a period of immense academic pressure, but the relentless learning pushed me to my limits and enriched me deeply.

I am deeply grateful for my parents' continuous support. Now that everything is steadily falling into place, my heart is full of gratitude. My only regret this year is missing both my undergraduate and master's graduation ceremonies. Here is to making a wish: I hope to successfully earn my PhD and finally attend the graduation ceremony I've been longing for!

I still remember during my PhD interview, someone had written on the blackboard by the door: "Don't do AI! It'S, BAD!!! You will regret I". I wonder how I will answer this statement four years from now.