While 2025 will arguably not be remembered as a very positive year for humankind, for many reasons - first and foremost, raging wars and raising inequalities -, as we near its end some have tried to find good things to say about this particular revolution of our planet around the Sun. 
And who am I to blow against the wind? I have to tell you, 2025 for me has been a formidable year. But before I go into a list of achievements, let me paint this rosy picture in broad strokes. 

Professional achievements

In 2025 I am starting to see the first fruits of a long period of sowing the seeds of a new field of research within fundamental science, which started when, six years ago, I realized that the enormous successes of machine learning in increasing the performance of our data analyses (what I have been calling "the first AI revolution in fundamental science") were not going to propagate automagically to the next logical step - a second revolution, one about the way we conceive our experiments as a whole. 

A coherent push in that direction has been the sole focus of my research activities since then, and it has been for the most part a long walk in the desert, because the community of experiment designers and detector builders has been, and still is, really impervious to accept and embrace the power of AI. I founded the MODE collaboration in 2020 with the aim of producing a demonstration of end-to-end optimization of experiments, and we started to slowly collect solutions to "simple" use cases, and aggregate enlightened researchers in the new collaboration. It has been very hard to do this amidst the general scepticism (when not the sheer ignorance of differentiable programming, shown by some colleagues that were in charge of evaluating a funding request - shame on them!), but in 2025 the work has been starting to pay off, in tangible ways. Below I will mention a couple.

New lives

But besides satisfactory turns of events in my professional life, I must cite an event of paramount importance in my personal life. I recently became a father of two wonderful boys, something that at 59 years of age is, I have witnessed, an even more awesome experience than experiencing in your thirties (I have a son and a daughter from a previous marriage, and they are 26 and 22 years old now).

Arts

Besides the above accomplishments in professional and private matters, I will also mention that 2025 has been a year of consolidation in my piano playing skills. In 2024 I performed in 5 different concerts for piano and voice, which I gave with my wife in Australia, Spain, Greece (twice), Armenia. It was stressful but also very rewarding - I still remember with great vibes the incredible experience of playing a fantastic Steinway piano in the Megaro Mousikis of Thessaloniki. But I also got epicondilitis as a result of some straining of my elbow, probably due to too much piano practice. This year I only played one such concert, and I focused on improving my technique by taking on some very complex pieces from Schumann (Kreisleriana). More recently, I have gotten a lot of satisfaction from teaching myself how to play one of the most famous preludes by Rachmaninov.

And now for some random bits of star stories:

- The year started with the publication of a paper I am proud of. It is titled "Artificial Intelligence in Science and Society: the Vision of USERN", and it is a collaborative work of 20-something experts in various scientific disciplines. We published it in IEEE Access (you can get it here).

- In the early months of 2025 I co-authored a number of interesting studies on optimized experiment design in muography, calorimetry, on neuromorphic computing readout of calorimeters (a paper that paved the way to the winning application to Pathfinder, see below), and others.

- In February I published a very important study that demonstrates the end-to-end optimization of an astrophysics gamma-ray observatory. This was the result of almost two years of coding a full simulation pipeline of the SWGO experiment. Together with that, I discussed the optimization of multi-target utility functions (including the SWGO one) in a second paper that was also published in February.

- One story is literally about stars. In May I spent two nights under the dark skies of the Atacama desert aiming a marvelous 72cm-diameter telescope at galaxies and nebulae of the southern hemisphere, at the telescope ranch of Alain Maury (https://www.spaceobs.com). It was a fantastic experience.

- In July I got an invitation for a colloquium at the MIT IAIFI institute. My visit will take place next April, and I consider the interest of the institute in my research activity a demonstration (among others) of the visibility that it has acquired recently.

- Two months later, I was invited to discuss my research at a plenary talk at an AI conference in Singapore. This will also take place in 2026 (June). Funnily, I was about to discard the invitation as a scam, when I realized it was instead a genuine and important event, and the inviter was a Physics Nobel prize winner!
 
- In October I won a EIC-PATHFINDER-OPEN grant application. The project, which awarded the consortium 3.2M euro, is focused on nanophotonics-driven neuromorphic computing for detector design. 

- In November I was re-elected as President of the USERN organization (https://usern.org), a non-profit network fostering interdisciplinary scientific research and education across borders.

- In December my wife gave birth to Alessandro and Leonardo, two beautiful babies.

That is it for this year... I can't wait to see what 2026 has in store for me! As you may have read in this column already, I believe we live in a 4D crystal, and our trajectories are already drawn. In other words, there is no free will, only an illusion of it in our perception of a flowing time. If that is the case, we are only actors in a play written for us by this particular instantiation of a Universe. And we may sit back and enjoy the ride!