Internet, The Present.
It is very underwhelming every time I read news on the internet. My home city, the biggest economy center of the region with a population of 13M people, has implemented social distancing orders for two months. Nobody can go outside in the evening without medical emergencies. People are only allowed to go to the supermarket twice a week. There is a small shortage of vacinnes. Only 10% of the nation's population got the first dose. Despite all of these, the number of positive cases keeps rising without any sign of improvement despite more stringent policies.
On the side of the Pacific Ocean, California is undergoing the worst drought in the past 20 years. The West Coast is suffering from historical wildfire mostly caused by thunderstorms of Pyrocumolous. (Please don’t talk about making rain by lightning here. It just makes things worse.) CDC says that the Delta variant makes COVID-19 be transmissible as the chicken pox, but much more severe. Despite vaccination, everybody can carry a biological gun 1260 times stronger than last year.
I keep asking myself what is the most frustrating thing that I have tried, but unsuccessful to get it done. The only hope is to help me escape this boredom, so we have the history of AI. I tried to rewrite this part several times and did write some chapters, but it was not into anything that lifted me up. Honestly, I hate reading plain text books except for math, so I would not try to mimic any of them. I always love adventures. In addition, there is some great news.
A few days ago, DeepMind just released open source code of Alpha Fold - the algorithm that revolutionizes how we predict protein structures - on the internet. This will open a gate to a generation of therapeutic companies with a promise of finding cures for some of the toughest diseases. Hopefully, we will see COVID-19 in the list.
However, just five years ago, it was still considered as the impossible dream of the rebels.
Internet, The Present (here, updated)
I just started graduate research. Singapore, 2015 (updated)
The dropout. Vietnam, Fall 2015. (updated)
Moved to the Valley. San Francisco, 2016 (updated)
A race of AI research. Vietnam, 2016 (updated)
Research is like trekking. Canada, 2018 (updated)
The conferences. Canada, Winter 2018 (updated)
A search for a computing power. San Francisco, 2018 (updated)
The beginning of a world trip. Montreal, 2019 (updated)
A learning community. Vietnam, 2019 (updated)
Starting a company. Switzerland, France, Germany and Italy, 2019 (updated)
An amazing race. Asia and Canada, 2019 (updated)
Ps: this is a raw draft - I still trying to write and re-write to capture the right narrative. Here I will post the first 1000 words for each chapter. Please subscribe to follow the latest updates.
Edit: This is around 14.7K words — I am happy to make it till this end. Still need to refine and add more content later!
Edit 2: I am working on a better outline and adding 2K words for each chapter. There will be another post.