A perspective on explicit compactifications of the moduli space of surfaces and pairs

In this talk, we will discuss techniques for explicitly describing the degenerations parametrized by the KSBA moduli space of surfaces and log pairs of general type. We will focus on specific examples, such as certain Horikawa surfaces and cubic surfaces, and how our techniques have been applied to them. These results were obtained in joint work with L. Schaffler, G. Pearlstein, Z. Zhang, and M. Kerr.