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Book one

Leaving

Every chapter of this book begins with leaving somewhere.

In June 2025 I left Chiang Mai for a summer of research at JAIST, in Ishikawa. The plane came in low over green mountains wrapped in cloud, and I spent the whole descent with my face against the window. What follows is that summer, kept the way I kept it: in photographs of small things.

Book two

The table

I cooked for one, in a dorm kitchen, and photographed almost every bowl.

Rice with a fried egg and spring onion. Pork stir-fried with leeks. Pasta with thick-cut bacon, eggs baked in tomato, toast on a black plate. On the counter, a tray of pea shoots grew taller every day. None of this belongs on a CV. It was simply the part of the day I looked forward to most.

Book three

The sky

On the way home I kept stopping to photograph the evening.

Clouds lit orange from underneath, the last sun on the walls of the dorms, a clear sky over the car park. Looking up is a habit I never lost, and it is how I ended up in astronomy: looking for the faint traces galaxies leave when they merge. That story is another book on the table.

Open my sky viewer→

Book four

The garden

A garden is nature that someone has patiently put in order.

A heron at the edge of a green pond, a stone lantern in the moss, one maple red among the green. Every stone has its place, every tree its name. My work that summer was close to this. An ontology is a garden made of facts: you decide what each thing is called and how it stands beside the others, so that a machine can find its way through.

Walk through my knowledge graph→

Book five

The road

Bus stop RE38, a shuttle timetable, and a quiet town below green hills.

I learned the timetable by heart and then walked anyway, more than I had in years and usually with nowhere to be. A path under the trees, a corner I passed most days, a main street turning blue at dusk. The road teaches the same thing every time: most of what is worth seeing is on the way, not at the end.

Book six

The market

A market is where a place tells you what it eats.

I can spend an hour in a foreign supermarket and call it sightseeing. Peaches and grapes boxed like jewellery, king oyster mushrooms in purple bands, lanterns over a seafood counter, leeks as long as my arm. The basket slowly turns into the week’s dinners, which you have already seen.

Book seven

Play

Used cartridges, shelves of figures, and the games I never grew out of.

A Donkey Kong cartridge for ¥480. Godzilla behind glass. An alphabet drawn in blocks, like a font from an old game. At home I translate Stardew Valley mods into Thai and build small word games, for no better reason than that they are fun. Play is where I learn the most while believing I am doing nothing.

Play a word game→See the translations→

Book eight

The desk

The work comes last, and briefly.

In a library, early editions of Newton, Galileo and Bacon sat behind glass. My own desk was a laptop, a second screen and notes pinned to the wall. That summer I built pipelines that pull meaning out of documents into an ontology, for testing the safety of automated driving, and ran them on the KAGAYAKI cluster. The rest is one click away, and it answers questions.

Query the CV→