Kempner Sketchpad with Cindy Luo

Kempner Sketchpad is a workshop series focused on works in progress where Kempner Graduate Fellows share early-stage ideas and work. In each session, a Fellow gives an informal presentation on something they are currently working on and would like feedback on—for example, research questions, analysis pipelines, figure design, puzzling results, or ways to bring in other disciplines. The focus is on constructive feedback, brainstorming, and community-building, rather than polished talks.

Cindy will present exploratory analysis from a first/second-year project on representational geometry and the effect of recurrence. The talk will briefly review relevant literature, introduce the research question, describe methods used, and share initial results. A key goal of the session is to get feedback on how to transition from this exploratory phase to a more goal-directed, phase.

To guide the discussion, Cindy has proposed questions such as:

• How interesting or surprising are these results, and why?
• Can we identify any cohesive stories from the results?
• If any additional analysis directions could be worth pursuing (in what ways could she make it more interesting?)
• (an open-ended question/goal) interesting connections in other areas/papers that could be relevant to her current findings.

Everyone welcome! There’s value in different perspectives, so even if this is slightly outside your subfield, please come and collaborate.