Using wearables to improve human health.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the concept of being organic. To me, being organic means not forcing things to happen. It’s a mindset of alignment—understanding nature, respecting its pace, and allowing things to unfold naturally. This way of thinking applies not just to personal life, but also to how we work, grow, and create. Being organic shares similarities with being authentic—both encourage…
Thinking is perhaps the most important and yet most under-valued activity for young scientists . When I went through my PhD training, I saw myself and other highly motivated peers being mostly occupied with activities of doing science rather than thinking. Figure 1: A simplified view of the scientific process PhD students spend most of their time doing science for good and bad reasons. As…
About 2-3 years ago, Daphne Koller gave a thought-provoking talk on how representation learning can be used to accelerate drug discovery using genetics at the Big Data Institute, Oxford. I thought her talk was super cool as I also work on representation learning. But I couldn’t really understand what’s been done due to my lack of knowledge in the field of genetics. Thus, I decided to write on this…
Authors: Hang Yuan & Rosemary Walmsley & Shing Chan Keywords: Human activity recognition, IMU, wearables, machine learning HAR intro Human activity recognition (HAR) is a popular application for wearable devices. HAR describes the techniques that classify human activities from time series. In HAR applications, we often use data from several modalities, such as images and accelerometers/Inertial…
Why I took off my headphones The young generation likes to have their headphones on. Some do this simply for fun, while others do it for a better reason and more efficient use of their time. This can be achieved by listening to audiobooks or being on a conference call when we have extra bandwidth in addition to what we are already doing. I used to be one of those who have their headphones on all…
Diversity oh well Diversity. Being born in a country that puts the education above all else, it is not surprising that the first time that I heard this word was at a college fair in my hometown, Guiyang, China. It was a fair about the Top 50 US Universities. I still remember vividly what the keynote speaker told the audience, “What makes America great is diversity.” At the time, while still being…
On June 11th of this year, one of my best friends Noma from Zimbabwe updated her Facebook profile into the picture below: From left to right is me, Noma and Thato (another good friend of mine from Lesotho) wearing Jacobs Robe and scarf. The description that Noma put for the photo was “Thank you for being my two pillars of strength for the past three years, As we say at Jacobs, this is not goodbye…
Last week, I got the chance to attend IK at Guenne in Northern Germany. The whole week was packed with inspirational lecture series and thought-provoking conversations. I got to meet many scientists and students coming from different backgrounds that were interested in the intersection of brain sciences, life sciences, and artificial intelligence. I would totally love to go back to IK again next…
Inspired by a friend of mine who just started his computer science career at CMU out of high school, I have finally found some time to write this long waited Undergraduate Research 101 to help more young and bright students to get to the right track to becoming future researchers. Normally when you see a blog post like this, it is written from the perspective of the faculty members but this time I…