Talking from Nobel Prizes

 The Nobel Prizes in 2026 were announced last week. As usual, the announcement of the Nobel Prizes can always be controversial and trigger much discussion. When the Nobel Prize for Physics was announced in 2024, a familiar name caught my attention: the winner, Geoffrey Hinton. He is, of course, one of the most famous machine learning pioneers alive. However, shouldn't his research be in a field other than physics? Yeah, the name of his machine learning model is the Boltzmann Machine, but there is little connection to the physical world, which is similar to two different people with no connection sharing the same name.

In late 2013, when I was conducting research in computer vision, Clinton suggested a reference about facial expression recognition to me, which was based on a variation of the Boltzmann Machine. I found Hinton's paper published in 1984. This was the first time I had encountered a paper that was too challenging to understand in a short time. Maybe I had too many challenges to tackle during that period, making my progress slow. In addition, Sridha seemed to have changed into another person since I came back from attending ICCV 2013 in Sydney. He no longer appreciated or supported me. Nevertheless, the difficulty of understanding the Boltzmann Machine made me lose some confidence. I was very glad in 2024 to see Hinton awarded a Nobel Prize, which meant the paper itself was hard enough.

During my days in academia, I was grateful to work with someone who had the same capability as any Nobel Prize winner. I mean Professor Wil van der Aalst. He was the first author of the C-YAWL paper, but I didn't know he was that famous when I was working on C-YAWL. In fact, his contributions could definitely be awarded two Turing Awards. At the end of 2014, he visited QUT. I told him that I was the master's degree student from several years ago who did the C-YAWL development, and that I was glad to meet him, the first author of the paper.

"Ah, I see! You did C-YAWL!" He sighed and said he was really very glad to see me in the BPM team. I told him that I'd finished my studies and migrated to Australia.

"You should be very glad to settle and work here. I know many people in China want to migrate to Australia, as I often visit Tsinghua University," he said. He gave me a gift, which was a school bag that QUT had given to him.

My job in the BPM team at QUT was not going smoothly. Rather, I thought I had been bullied by my supervisors again and again. I didn't know why. In the end, I lodged an official complaint—not about the bullies, but about the authorship matter of the C-YAWL paper. I thought Wil would stand by my side. However, he denied my contributions, which left me rather shocked. In fact, I just wanted to have a reconciliation on that matter at the time. I think the authorship of the paper will eventually damage his reputation if he cannot achieve a reconciliation with me.

One day, in my university dormitory roommates' WeChat group chat, I said I didn't think those with Nobel Prizes or Turing Awards were really all better than me in research. At the very least, I was better than Professor Wil van der Aalst in process mining, and much better than Professor Simon Lucey, who led the Australian Machine Learning Institute in Adelaide. My roommates laughed at me. I found it hard to explain it to them. I was disappointed that they didn't believe me, so I quit the group without any hesitation.