Halloween Costumes

2013: John Saw Mary

My former advisor, Jason Eisner, likes to point out that even a sentence as simple as "John saw Mary" can have multiple parses. For instance, "John saw Mary" could be a serial killer, much like Typhoid Mary, who kills with a weapon called the "John saw".

On Halloween 2013, the depraved killer John saw Mary burst into Jason's lab meeting, declaring that she would have revenge on him for revealing her whereabouts in the parse forest where she'd been hiding. It is believed that Tim Vieira fought her off with a pair of pruning shears (while also taking this photo).

2014: A Hyperedge

For Halloween, 2014, I dressed up as hyperedge with four tentacles (meaning it can connect to four nodes, unlike a regular edge, which can only connect to two).

Unbeknownst to me, my future advisor, David Chiang, was actually giving a talk on hyperedge replacement grammars that very day! So I got to attend his talk dressed as a hyperedge. Despite this, he later accepted me to grad school.

2018: The Multi-Armed Bandit

Better watch out! This robber is armed!

2022: An Overfull Hbox

With apologies to my advisor's very excellent Named Tensor Notation. (For those who are wondering, the gloves are latex.)