Adam Li

Adam Li

Postdoctoral Research Scientist in Causal AI

Personal Goals - 2025

4 minute read

Published:

Summary: A summary of goals for 2025.

Summary of 2024

Personal

Travel

Health

Professional

Societal

Old 2024 Goals:

0. Communal with Partner

This year is a milestone for us because we’re going to finally get married. Besides that, we’re also going to move in together and potentially even more cities! This year is full of change, so I think the biggest thing on my mind is to enjoy the time for what it is.

  • Document enjoyable moments.

1. Health

  • Reach a 45 VO2 max on Apple Watch or above.
    • In fact, this year I reached a peak of 48 VO2 max on my Apple Watch. I think this is a good goal to keep up with. Next year, I think I can optimize my training, hit 50, and do a legit VO2 max test.
  • Run another 10k and half marathon.
    • I did not run another half marathon, but I did run a 10k with a 7:11 min/mile pace. I think I can do better next year, and aim for a sub 7:30 min/mile pace for a half marathon.
  • Lose 10 lbs to a steady 160 lbs.
    • I did hit a steady 160 due to running a lot, but I think I can be a bit healthier and aim for 155 lbs, while consistently working out and maintaining my salad diet during the weekdays.
  • Hit under a 100 in golf.
    • Haven’t had too much time this year.
  • Take 1 hot-yoga class per month, or more.
    • Surprisingly, was able to accomplish this using classpass! I think I can continue this goal next year.

2. Professional

This year is a bit hard to figure out. On one hand, I’m still very much interested in having a career in research and potentially academia. On the other hand, I understand the challenges of finding a geographical location both my partner and I would live at, with sufficient pay with a fulfilling career. With that in mind, I set a few goals assuming my postdoc will come to an end towards the later half of this year.

  • Finish my JMLR paper on causal discovery across multiple environments.
    • A lot of the paper was cleaned up this year, and I’m hoping
  • Get MIGHT paper published.
    • This paper improved drastically, and is now in review at PNAS!
  • Finish scikit-tree development of hypothesis testing (via OSPO) and causal effect estimation (via VISS Schmidt Futures and OSPO).
    • The VISS Schmidt folks were very collaborative with this work, and were able to explore the design space of the tree codebase in Cython. I think our future work will have to involve C++ and CRTP template design to avoid inheritence-based polymorphism.
  • Write one new paper on causal inference related to either causal discovery, or causal representation learning.
    • Got a 2024 NeurIPS paper that does some cool theory and experimental work on causal representation learning.
  • Finish series of PRs to add missing-value support for ExtraTrees in scikit-learn.
    • Became a scikit-learn core developer this year!

3. Misc. / Outreach / Societal Impact

  • Schedule 5-6 blood donations this year.
    • Only hit 4 this year, but I think I can do better next year.
  • Maintain a greater than 600 day streak in Duolingo. Continuing this goal from last year.
    • Hit a 600+ day streak this year.
  • Read 2-3 books this year in my spare time at night.
    • I think I can do better next year.

2025 Goals:

Wow this year was crazy! I got married to my partner, moved in together, and started a new job at Amazon as a Senior Applied Scientist. I am super grateful for the amount of positive changes that have come my way, and so excited for my life with my partner. I think this year I want to focus on a few things:

  1. make sure I’m healthy and fit for the long run.
  2. make sure my partner is healthy and fit for the long run.
  3. make core memories with my partner when possible.
  4. make sure I’m learning and growing in my career.

0. Communal with Partner

1. Health

  • Reach a steady 50 VO2 max on Apple Watch or above.
  • Run a 10k with under 7:00 min/mile pace and a half marathon under 8:00 min/mile pace.
  • Lose 5lbs to a steady 155 lbs.

2. Professional

  • Learn how to add MPS operator to PyTorch Aten library for a common linear algebra operation, such as SVD. (https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/77764)
  • Finish my JMLR paper on causal discovery across multiple environments.
  • Finish JMLR paper on causal representation learning
  • Implement CRTP template design for scikit-tree to avoid inheritence-based polymorphism.
  • Learn new causal inference and deep learning techniques to address challenges in advertisement at Amazon.

3. Misc. / Outreach / Societal Impact

  • Schedule 5-6 blood donations this year.
  • Maintain a greater than 900 day streak in Duolingo.

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