June 2026

6 Brussels photos: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza statue, Grand-Place's ornate spires, a green lakeside meadow, row of gabled guild houses at the city center, statue of General Belliard, statue of King Albert I with a bird on his head.

I visited Brussels.

Walked 28 kilometers and liked the city much better than Paris; there were fewer pigeons maimed, apparently, with human hair.
But I decided that this is the end of my “tourism” adventure. It's not for me, and my default settings were validated. I just wanted to give it a shot and be done with this FOMO thing.

I like moving around and experiencing living in different places; it is essential to my nature. But going somewhere just for a few days makes no sense to me.

PS. Next FOMO to deal with: visiting museums and galleries.

May 2026

For the very first time in my adult life, I traveled just for the sake of traveling.

It was not that far from home. Still the concept that I have no reason to be in Paris, and yet I am spending time and money to be there was/is wild regarding my lifestyle.

Anyway, I walked about 24 kilometers and visited a couple of speakeasies.

While the experience was mind-blowing for me, I found nothing really special about the city, except for the smell of urine and pigeons with missing toes.

PS. Didn’t expect Eiffel to look so rusty.

April 2026

A smiling Sahar Niknam wearing a black graduation cap and a dark green bow tie raises a large glass of beer in a toast, seated inside a restaurant.

This Happened.

I am now a doctor of philosophy in computer science. Weird shit.

March 2026

A person in a red shirt sits in a chair wearing a VR headset and headphones, gesturing astonishment with both hands raised, against a black background.

Imaginary Research

I am one very proud published author in the Journal of Imaginary Research, Volume 11.

My abstract, a research by Prof. Zula Mitty, is about shrinking books into 30-second multisensory experience in virtual reality.

February 2026

The figure shows the experimental pipeline, starting from a close-up eye image with overlaid measurements, followed by extracted numerical eye-tracking parameters, and ending with a schematic representation indicating gaze direction.

Spatio-Temporal Visualization of Eye-Tracking Data

Our paper, Spatio-Temporal Representation of Eye-Tracking Data for Cognitive Failure Detection in VR, has been accepted for presentation at the SHAPEXR Workshop, part of the 2026 ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (ACM IUI). This work will also be presented as a poster at the 2026 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

January 2026

Line plots showing pupil diameter over time to trial end for two participants. Three conditions are shown: correct answers, wrong answers, and missed answers. For both participants, pupil diameter decreases toward the end for correct answers.

Oops’s and Oh’s

Our paper, Oopses and Ohs: An Eye-Tracking Study of Human Errors in Virtual Reality, has been accepted for presentation at the GEMINI Workshop, in the 33rd IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR).

The dataset will be released soon.

2025