Happy New Year of the (Open) String! Like the snake, the string symbolizes wisdom and transformation. Let’s hope that we have the wisdom to solve all our challenges #YearofSnake

It’s great to have Kendrick Smith from ⁦Perimeter Institute⁩ telling us about “Fast Radio Bursts with Chime” at our ⁦UW-Madison Physics⁩ Colloquium.

1/5 Our theoretical physics benchmark for AI, TPBench, is out! Check out the website tpbench.org for scores, paper and examples. Collaboration with Fred Sala Maja Rudolph TSC Yurii Kvasiuk Tianyi ZHIQI GAO UW-Madison Physics datascience@uw. Some thoughts.

Great to have Zeeshan Ahmed (SLAC) giving our ⁦UW-Madison Physics⁩ colloquium today on “Investigating cosmic origin and evolution with the oldest photons”.

arxiv.org/abs/2503.05862

New paper alert! With Puxin Lin and Alessandro Mininno Alessandro Mininno UW-Madison Physics we formulate the Weak Gravity Conjecture in Anti de Sitter Space: arxiv.org/abs/2503.05862 Interesting plot twist about BPS states and the Weak Gravity Conjecture!

Great to have Sash Sarangi EMALPHA.AI visiting UW-Madison Physics for a couple of days and giving an interesting seminar on "Thinking Fast and Slow". The video recording of his talk is now on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=3WAaLO…

While we are at it, this is my YouTube Channel: youtube.com/@Gary_Shiu Still very much under construction. Subscribe at your own risk :)

Videos for the UW-Madison HEP Theory and Cosmology Seminar UW-Madison Physics: physics.wisc.edu/events/?name=H… are now on YouTube. You can find the first few talks this year by Asher Berlin, Alberto Castellano, and Gordon Krnjaic Gordan Krnjaic on my playlist: youtube.com/@gary_shiu

Great to have Craig Lawrie fron ⁦DESY (English)⁩ visiting us ⁦UW-Madison Physics⁩ this week. His talk on “Generalized symmetry constraints on deformed 4d (S)CFTs is now on our YouTube channel: youtu.be/ALKNwSCkhqg?si…

Congratulations to my undergraduate advisee Qing (Helena) Huang for winning the Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship! While her major is in Statistics, Data Science and Information Science, her award winning work with me is deeply rooted in ⁦UW-Madison Physics⁩

Visiting ⁦Nordita⁩ for 2 days giving a colloquium and a seminar. This is how a physics institute should look like: a place to cultivate deep thoughts without forgetting fun! ⁦UW-Madison Physics⁩

The word Swampland has now permeated other branches of theoretical physics. Nice talk by Gian Giudice at the MasieroFest (part of the Planck 2025 conference: indico.dfa.unipd.it/event/1200/ ) ⁦Swamp Thing⁩ ⁦Eran Palti⁩

A violation of the strong energy condition can arise by coupling dark matter and dark energy, even if both individually satisfy it. Could this lead to cosmic horizons in string compactifications? We seek an answer in arxiv.org/abs/2506.19914 [with Gary Shiu and Hung V. Tran]

Excited to share with you an exciting project with Jacky Yip UW-Madison Physics and Charles Arnal and François Charton Meta where we develop a transformer model to automate the generation of Calabi-Yau manifolds, extra dimensional spaces in string theory: arxiv.org/abs/2507.03732

Check out this project from DSI Affiliate Gary Shiu!

In Seoul this week for Strings in Seoul: events.kias.re.kr/h/sis2025/