The last time when I was in Vietnam was in 2018. Afterwards, I traveled non stop for research. In retrospect, I didn't even notice time and space. In my head, it was always the question about the next step. Now or Never. And I tried to do everything as fast as possible before running out of budget again.
Sometimes I would feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. One day a tornado of thoughts took me and my laptop away from the home land and at the end I landed in a strange land.
If somebody asked me what I did most of the time during trips, I would say working in front of a computer, then finding shelter, food, coffee, a monitor and the internet. Sometimes I wrote something but it was more like food for thoughts. I was so tired with debugging in source code that I could not have any other time to think of something else.
When returning to Vietnam, I just realized that oh it was like a dream, but it was not. To pursue research, I left my parents’ home several years ago to escape a social pressure of having a family several years ago. And there were several unspoken pain during trips in the West. I spent lots of time on the internet, but my mind was so tired from all of the past experiences. I was dragged by algorithms on social media. There was a moment that I started to lose a sense of the present, but living in a loop of the past. Emotional instability made me become easily wired with several sensitive negative content like an echo chamber.
However, I was lucky that I was in the motherland. I made a tour to visit a few old cities in the central and the northern region of the country. The change of environment with a traffic jam and humid weather really forced me to wake up several times. Visited coffee shops. Connected to the root of my country. Reviewed culture and the beauty of values of the East World through stories of Buddhism.
A classroom of 14 people two years ago that year turned into a community of thousands of participants. People taught each other and transferred knowledge. Besides Ho Chi Minh City, we started to have another group in Ha Noi. I was so happy to hear a university student share about the projects they collaborated with others. This was an experience on my first trip in San Francisco 2016.
I connected to the organizations of culture and environment to help them transfer knowledge like what I did several years ago in the first project. Several years ago, it was just a student project about green energy technology from a group of engineering students in the UK to Vietnam through tourism and culture exploration. Then we opened a competition to apply technology to solve climate change in a remote area in Vietnam. When in Canada, I tried to make an intro to them, however, organizers only took local organizations. I realized that I was the only person who could build that bridge, at least I was a mentor of AI4Good. So, on this return trip, I tried everything I could from university and family relationships to start a project.
Then I got an invitation to join an international challenge in Switzerland.
I was still trying to write my first book about predictive analytics. Basically it was all of my past experience as a data scientist and AI researcher in Canada and the US. However, I could not complete the first chapter as an intro for people. At the beginning, the structure was pretty clear. It would be UX, product design and data science. However, I got stuck at the principle of design based on human-center philosophy.
I need my audience to understand, not memorize what I wrote. And the creativity part is so hard to write it down in the way that most people could comprehend. I did not have enough material to complete the first chapter. Writing about technology is not hard for me. Following several core groups of research and top companies, I can describe a landscape in a few sentences.
However, if people read what I write, it does not mean that they understand. It is similar to studying math. The most complaints I heard about my undergraduate degree was studying for what. We had computers that were much faster and more accurate than humans in calculation. You just need to hit enter and get a result in less than one second. You might know how to make a calculation and get the right result, but it does not mean that you understand how that math is proposed. It is similar to how everyone can calculate Einstein’s equation given the knowledge of all parameters, but very few people really know how to use it in the right use case. If this does not make sense for you, think of the alphabet, we all know the characters and how to write words, phrases and letters. However, a few of them are passwords or an award winning masterpiece.
In the culture of copy & paste, it does not make sense to several people to ask why before doing something. Before knowing a problem, they are very confident. They have memorized all the solutions. Then, we refer to intelligence as a capacity for memorization. Then people keep stacking complicated solutions whereas it should be pretty simple once you understand a problem. Then it was not about whether we have a better skill but we have a better memorization and who has more resources to make an advantage.
AI is more like a smart search in the vast space of possibility to find the closest prediction of the future that would align to our goal. That space is created by knowledge in the past. The more we know the better we are able to find out the next right thing. However the most valued information can not be found in textbooks but insights from experimentation. And this is only known by a small number of people.
Human communication is much more complicated than engineering. Humans have opinions, dreams, beliefs and a set of values that make life become meaningful.
That was a tricky part when writing the book.