Chapter 60 Grinds the Paper

Zhou Yun felt that aside from being a bit challenging, this research topic had no issues whatsoever regarding innovation. Moreover, although he had not yet published any papers specifically in multimodal data fusion, he had already built a decent foundation in the field.

For the next month, he dedicated almost all of his time to this new research.

The final formatting adjustments for his previous paper on time-series detection had been handed over to two of his fellow first-year graduate students. With Deng Yonghua overseeing the process, nothing went wrong.

The manuscript was submitted at the beginning of October, and he even graciously listed the two peers as co-authors on the third tier. Although it did not hold much practical value for them, it still kept the two of them thrilled for quite a while.

December 1st, 1:00 AM.

The laboratory was once again left with only Zhou Yun. A computer screen displayed the Overleaf interface.

Beside the keyboard sat a cup of coffee, still half full.

The skin under his eyes was bruised and dark, an obvious consequence of prolonged sleep deprivation, and his eyes were dry and bloodshot.

The past month of research had put him through the wringer. Although he was a computer science major, his thesis involved a massive amount of advanced mathematical theory.

Conducting mathematical research was far more difficult than computer science. He finally understood why the mathematics departments of some top universities were often referred to as insane asylums.

Fortunately, the outcome was positive. He had successfully abstracted information from different modalities into a single representation space, and judging by his experimental results, the performance was exceptionally impressive.

Zhou Yun leaned back in his ergonomic chair, his spine pressing against the backrest, and turned his head to look at the other screen.

It displayed the interface of a plagiarism-checking website.

Regardless of how significant he believed his thesis's contribution or innovation to be, under the rigid standards of a graduation thesis, passing the similarity check was the absolute first hurdle.

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Looking at the result, his face darkened.

Well, there went a hundred bucks down the drain. He couldn't help but complain that the plagiarism-checking fees charged by these so-called official paper publishers were simply outrageous.

Then, he reviewed the similarity report.

His expression grew even darker.

This damn plagiarism detection software was truly lacking in intelligence!

It only knew how to rigidly match sentences against prior papers. Did it not understand that changing just a few words could completely alter the meaning of a statement?

He glared fiercely at the computer screen.

Given the chance in the future, he would definitely develop a brand-new plagiarism-detection algorithm. As long as a paper's core had genuine innovation and contained no plagiarism, wasn't that enough? Why split hairs over exact wording?

***

However, those were just passing thoughts for now; what needed revising still had to be revised.

Before fixing the thesis, Zhou Yun narrowed his eyes, switched browser tabs to the account of "Mr. Zhai," randomly clicked on a post, and opened the comment section.

Sure enough, even though the post had been published years ago, the latest comment was timestamped at 0:01—just moments ago.

Scrolling down, the comments were all identical.

[Big brother, have you gone to sleep? How have you been lately? Because of you, I can't get my thesis to pass.]

These were all kindred spirits currently being tortured by their graduation theses.

He had to admit that this individual would forever be remembered in infamy.

Netizens had even dubbed that fateful year as "Year One of Tianlin."

After all, whenever plagiarism checks were mentioned, people would never forget the grand contribution made by this person. Because of him, not only graduation theses, but even many coursework papers were now subjected to mandatory similarity checks.

Zhou Yun chimed in and left a reply at the bottom to vent a fraction of his own frustration.

[You asleep? I'm still wide awake!]

He had no idea if the person would ever see it, but realistically, they wouldn't.

After posting the comment, he took a sip of coffee and forced himself to push past his exhaustion to continue revising the thesis.

By the following morning, Qiu Yan had just arrived at the lab when he spotted Zhou Yun still sporting dark circles under his eyes, hard at work revising his paper.

"Whoa! Did you pull an all-nighter yesterday?" Qiu Yan asked, lifting a plastic bag containing a few steamed pork buns. "Want some?"

"Thanks." Having gone without sleep all night, Zhou Yun was utterly starved, his stomach burning uncomfortably from gastric acid.

After wolfing down a few buns, he felt a noticeable improvement.

"Not to mention, you're really pushing yourself too hard. You've already published two papers anyway, there's no need to rush like this."

He had no idea Zhou Yun was working on his graduation thesis; he simply assumed Zhou Yun had hit upon another new idea and wanted to rush out another paper for a top-tier conference.

"It's not a short paper. It's my graduation thesis."

Qiu Yan stretched his neck, a giant question mark appearing in his mind. "What on earth? Your graduation thesis?! Aren't you just a first-year grad student?"

"Did I not mention it? I chatted with Teacher Deng last month, and he agreed to let me graduate early. I just need to write a graduation thesis first. Otherwise, what do you think I've been doing this past month?" Zhou Yun nodded matter-of-factly.

"Huh? No, I thought you were writing a regular journal paper."

"What kind of journal paper takes this long to write? At most it's a dozen pages, isn't one week enough?"

***

Unbeknownst to him, this casual remark dealt yet another heavy blow to Qiu Yan's fragile psyche.

The corners of Qiu Yan's mouth twitched. "So, you knocked out an entire graduation thesis in a month?"

What did he mean by "a journal paper takes a week"? Just listen to that—was that something a human being would say?

"I'm not completely finished yet. The similarity check failed last night, so I spent the whole night revising it. I'll take another look in a moment, should be fine now."

Qiu Yan felt slightly consoled. It seemed that even a genius like Zhou Yun was not immune to the torment of plagiarism software.

Yet it still felt absurd, considering he had spent nearly half a year working on his own thesis, start to finish.

He shook his head and sat back down at his desk.

It appeared his tenure as the senior lab brother was going to come to an end in less than a year.

"Hey, where are you planning to go for your Ph.D. then? Have you figured it out yet?"

Zhou Yun exported his revised thesis as a PDF, uploaded it back to the checking website, and joked, "What if I decide not to pursue a Ph.D.?"

"As if! If even you aren't willing to do a Ph.D., how am I supposed to bother? Seriously though, where are you planning to go?"

"No idea. Maybe go abroad for a doctorate? I hear that if you want to teach at a university in the future, having overseas study experience is basically a requirement. Is that even true or just a rumor? Never mind me, what about you? Weren't you going to do a Ph.D.? Where are you headed?"

He genuinely hadn't put much thought into doctoral studies yet; going anywhere was pretty much the same to him anyway, and he could always consult Deng Yonghua for advice when the time came.

"Me? No clue. I'll just follow Teacher Deng's arrangements. He said he has some connections, so at the very least it'll be a Double First-Class university, right? But honestly, lately I've been losing the desire to do a Ph.D. myself." Having spent so much time around Zhou Yun, he had gained a much clearer and more sobering understanding of his own capabilities.

Compared to a freak of nature like him, he simply wasn't cut out for scientific research.

Hearing this, Zhou Yun merely nodded without pushing him to pursue a doctorate. After all, pursuing a Ph.D. was practically a gamble; the only reason he wanted to do it was because he believed he held the winning cards.

As for Qiu Yan, it completely depended on his own choice, and Zhou Yun had no particularly good advice to offer.

"We'll talk about that later. First, I need to get past this thesis defense. The requirements for graduation theses have gotten stricter year by year; if you end up with a delayed graduation, you can't do anything."

"It finally passed!" Zhou Yun gazed at the digits on the screen and let out a long sigh of relief.

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