Recent content on Frank Chen
Josee, the Tiger and the Fish - A romantic comedy drama anime with a beautiful score & some unexpected twists & turns 
 The Batman - Robert Pattinson gives a nuanced portrayal of the titular character during his early days of being a vigilante, with an equally powerful performance from Paul Dano as the Riddler 
 Encanto - The 60th film produced by Walt Disney animation studio, Encanto…
Today marks 1 year working at Twitter 🎉 I’ve met & worked with so many smart, passionate tweeps here, both virtually & in person. It is gratifying to work on improving a product that I use every day. 
 In true Twitter fashion, of course I had to share my learnings via tweets 
 Publishing full text below as well: 
 
 Celebrating 1 yr @Twitter ✅ working on improving a product…
Possessor - A scifi horror that blends the ‘sleeve’ technology concept of Altered Carbon with the cosmic suspense of Black Mirror 
 The Trial of the Chicago 7 - A historical legal drama with director/writer Aaron Sorkin’s iconic fast-paced dialogues and an ensemble cast, including Succession’s Jeremy Strong (I didn’t even recognize him as Jerry Rubin!) 
…
Before game 5 of the 2021 NBA Finals between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Phoenix Suns, the 26 year-old Bucks power forward Giannis Antetokounmpo gave a very reflective and insightful response to a question about his work ethics. 
 Paraphrased below, but highly recommend watching the entire video 
 “When you focus on the past, that’s your ego. When you focus on the future,…
Zhang Yiming (张一鸣) is the billionaire founder of Chinese internet company ByteDance, which develops a variety of apps, including the short-form video sharing platform TikTok. In his early 30s, while building his first startup, Zhang was also a prolific blogger, leaving a lot of his thoughts on work ethics, life philosophy, and relationship management on Weibo. These snippets from the early 2010s…
Tenet - A SciFi action-thriller that is best digested via multiple viewings while perusing Reddit discussions . 
 Nightcrawler - A neo-noir psychological-thriller with a highlight performance from Jake Gyllenhaal as a creepy, tenacious photojournalist. 
 The Irishman - An epic crime film that is well worth the extended 209-min runtime, with themes that echo Scorsese’s 1990 film,…
Recently, I’ve been interested in improving the performance of my website, especially on the ‘Drawings’ page, where I showcase some of my artwork. Images are often the most common cause of poor website performance, due to their large file size. I found a neat tool called Lighthouse that helps debug performance issues and provide suggestions for improvements. 
 I ran…
Pandas is a comprehensive Python library for data analysis, but its syntax for performing certain specific data transformations can be difficult to discern from its documentation. I recently used Pandas in my analysis of Billboard Top 100 Music data , and I’ve uncovered several useful commands that I will most likely use again in the future, so I’m compiling a (growing) list here for…
I built this site using Hugo. I built the previous version using Jekyll and Masonry 
 My first experience using Jekyll for building a personal website was with academicpages , which is an excellent theme that is mostly catered to, as you guessed, people in academia: it included many built-in front matter to list papers, publications, and talks. 
 I later switched to Minimal Mistakes ,…
Query languages (computer languages used to make queries in databases) are abundant in style and usage today. In 2018, Microsoft released Azure Data Explorer to GA, introducing another query language that is specifically optimized for semi-structured, unstructured, and time-series data. Even though we have many querying language options, they are all grounded in a field of mathematics called…
This was originally published on LinkedIn . 
 As 2018 comes to a close, I thought I’d share some of the lessons I learned this past year as a Program Manager at Microsoft . These opinions and observations are my own, and should be taken with the understanding that everyone’s professional journey is different. Some of these apply directly to the Program Management discipline, while…
The Kurtosis of a random variable $X$ is the fourth moment of $X$. For a normal distribution, we often see it in the textbook as: 
 $$
\begin{align}\label{kurt}
Kurt(X) = E\left[\left(\frac{X-\mu}{\sigma}\right)^4\right] - 3
\end{align}
$$ 
 My textbook explains: 
 “We subtract $3$ to make any Normal distribution have kurtosis $0$ " 
 I’ve always…

 In every introductory statistics class, we learned about the normal distribution, which has Probability Density Function (PDF): 
 $$
\tag{1} f(x | \mu, \sigma^2) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi \sigma^2}}e^{-\frac{(x-\mu)^2}{2\sigma^2}}
$$ 
 This looks like a fairly complicated equation, but the resulting graph (shown above) has some very cool properties (integrates to 1, represents…
Last night at home, I heard Chinese singer 汪峰’s hit song from 2017, titled ‘那年我五岁’ (That year when I was five), and surprisingly, I found that the lyrics and even the music video parallels the song ‘7 Years’ from Danish band Lukas Graham. After scrolling through the Internet, I have yet to find anyone else juxtaposing these two songs; henceforth, here’s my take: 
…
A great film consists not only of a great cast, but also a great director, screenwriter, composer, cinematographer, and costume designer. 
 Black Panther is recieving critical acclaim , and here are some of the amazing people who made this film great. 
 Director 
 Ryan Coogler is a visionary man. Just look at how he deconstructs a complicated fight sequence from the film in terms of…
I recently finished reading Prof. Song-Chun Zhu’s 60K+ character article on Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the holidays. One part of Prof. Zhu’s essay that caught my attention was Section 4, where he discusses the cognitive framework of AI research. 
 In the prior section, Prof. Zhu gives an extended example of a common crow that not only learned how to take advantage of passing cars to…
A couple weeks ago, my dad sent me a very long WeChat article , titled “浅谈人工智能：现状、任务、构架与统一 | 正本清源”. 
 Loosely translated, the title reads: “A light discussion of Artificial Intelligence: Current Situation, Purpose, Framework, and Unification | Finding the root of the issue” 
 The PI I used to do undergraduate research for — Prof. Song-Chun Zhu — wrote this 20,000+ character article. Prof.…
On June 17, 2017, I had the honor to speak about what being an Engineer means to me in front of 10,000+ people in Pauley Pavilion , at the 2017 UCLA Engineering Commencement for PhDs, Masters, and Bachelors degree recipients. As the Commencement Student Speaker, I wanted to find a voice that resonates with all Engineers, and so I focused on the qualities that applies to all of us moving forward:…
I completed my undergraduate degree this past June. Like many new grads preparing to work in industry, I feel nervous about making a smooth transition from being a student to being a working-class young adult. Where do I go from here? How do I live a good life? 
 Last night, I found some reassurance in a quote by a Chinese official in the 清 (Qīng) Dynasty. 
 The story starts with a typical…
A couple weeks ago, my dad sent me a link to an excellent blog entry written in Mandarin Chinese. I have always loved the Chinese language for its elegant brevity, and this entry was no exception. In just a few lines of characters, it succinctly summarized 3 qualities of self-worth. I wanted to share this with my friends in the United States, so I decided to translate the entry into English:
“The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.” — Jon Stewart 
 On Thursday, Comedy Central bid its final farewell to comedian Jon Stewart on The Daily Show . For 16 years, Jon scrutinized media, politicians, scandals, tragedies, and various controversies, using humor as his medium to give Americans a second lens into the world we live in…
Yesterday, my parents celebrated my birthday early, because I’ll be at college during my actual birthday later in January. Usually, I reflect about being 1 year older AFTER my birthday, but since I’ve been having this ‘early celebration’ for a while, so I thought I’ll jot down some of my thoughts about the big two-zero now. 
 
 Turning 20 is amazing. The moment when the tens-digit of your…