2021 - Annual Reflection - A New Chapter

This year marked many milestones in my life as:

1. It is the end of the plan that I made 5 years ago.
2. It is also the beginning of what I want to achieve within the next 5 years.
3. I finally got graduated from my Bachelor of Computer Science degree.
4. I got a full-time position as a Research Engineer in one of the largest AI research institutes in Australia.
5. I involved in many different startup projects to learn more and thrive.
6. It is the beginning of my annual reflection series.

Therefore, I reflect on what I have experienced over the year and want to send this reflection to my colleagues, my friends, my loved ones and my 18-year-old self. As this is the beginning of the series, I called it "A New Chapter", and I hope that you will learn at least one thing from this reflection.

1. Starting with empathy, altruism and open-mindedness

Mentoring is the activity that consists of three factor such as empathy, altruism and open-mindedness from both the mentor and the mentee in a conversation. The mentor empathically understands the mentee and altruistically contribute to the mentee's personal growth. In the return, the mentee needs to be open-minded to listen and learn from what has been shared by the mentor.

This year, I was lucky to be mentored by many experienced people from Microsoft, SAP, my professional clients and my colleagues. In the sessions with my mentors from Microsoft and SAP, I learned more about important things below:

1. The mindset and skills of the presale role in any kinds of products.
2. The work-life balance as a technical manager in large tech firms.
3. The culture of large tech firms.
4. How experienced people tell and inspire others with their back-stories.
5. Strengths and weaknesses of different continents in terms of investing and selling products.

And I was recommended to read the "Hit Refresh" book written by Satya Nadella - the current CEO of Microsoft - to understand more about the culture within Microsoft. These are key things that drive my mindset to the next level, that is the Growth mindset. Then, I learned more about innovation in research, education and mass-production and the overview of the challenges of the current AI applications from my colleagues and professors who I have been working with. Here, I started understanding and seeing the world in the different angles. The below are just a few examples:

• Innovation is not only novelty but the combination of prior knowledge (i.e., experience) and creativity. The outcome of this combination needs to bring values and create impacts on our society.
• The goal of research is not trying to identify novel knowledge in few application areas but trying to generalise knowledge that can be applied into many application areas.
• Every successful business has its unique deep insight that brings values to the society and helps the business to gain profits from the society's trust. For example, the deep insight of Microsoft is "to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more". This is one of the reasons why we have many cloud-based and mobile first productivity applications such as Microsoft Offices, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Planner, etc. developed by Microsoft.

Not only being mentored, but I am empathic with those who have less opportunities than myself. Therefore, I altruistically started creating many opportunities for those people. Here are a few examples:

• I shared my knowledge and vision to one of my friends who is extremely into doing startups and passionate about sustainable energy.
• I tutored a few people who was introduced by my friends with the hope that they will learn more about the ability to learn which thrives their life and future careers.
• I participated in Microsoft Student Accelerator program as a Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador to engage more than 2000 undergraduate students across Australia to learn more about trending industrial topics such as cloud computing with Microsoft Azure and artificial intelligence (AI). For more details, I have documented this experience in this blog post.
• I started mentoring many of my friends in Vietnam.
• I started helping talents who want to study the PhD degree in AI by connecting them with people who have scholarships.

All of these wouldn't be happened without empathy, altruism and open-mindedness. I would like to say special thanks to everyone who continue supporting and guiding me over the year. I will continue using all of these great opportunities to help the right people who need a door for their next chapter.

2. Life, study and work

2.1. A productive life

This year, I become more productive and resilient than previous years by continuously learning and evaluating productivity tips with the use of via tools (I have one blog post talking about these tools). I started getting used to the work-from-home (WFH) lifestyle that is the 80 - 100 hours study and work week. As I evaluate my plan for each month, I learned many different techniques to maintain and improve my wellbeing. For example, I started taking care of my eyes every screening hour, walking on every morning, having 7-mins exercise, eating healthier, being more hydrated and others. To further support my productivity, I first time invested heavily in building my home workspace with auto sit-stand desk, wireless mouse and keyboard, ergonomic office chair and double monitors.

With this sort of productivity, I have been studying more about many different topics deep learning in details, cloud computing, user interface and user experience for developing products, blockchain technology, machine learning in production (MLOps), startup concepts and more. I feel grateful to have opportunities to learn more these wonderful pieces of knowledge that empower myself to achieve more.

2.2. Study and work

This June marked the end of my 3-years Bachelor of Computer Science degree - I graduated. This early March was the first time I prepared my CV and drafted many research proposals to apply for PhD scholarships in three universities that I put on my grid analysis such as Swinburne University of Technology, Monash University and University of Melbourne. It took me 2 days for the CV preparation and 2 weeks for two research proposals. Then, I received two interview appointments and went through the entire process. The below are results:

• People in Monash University liked my profile. We started working together and putting my application into the university system. Unfortunately, in the final stage, I couldn't receive the scholarship because I do not have the Honour degree, according to the university's policy. To me, it was a pity due to my prior efforts. However, that door is not 100% closed because I still received the Winter scholarship for 2 months of work in the same research topic.
• People in Swinburne University also liked my profile. They offered me a scholarship. However, in the last minute, I realised that I was not much interested in the topic for 4 years of studying PhD degree. Therefore, I politely decided not to take an offer, and this moves me to my next decision (i.e., a full-time position at A2I2).
• I did not receive a replied email from University of Melbourne.

Although there are challenges, I enjoyed this experience because it made me more resilient for my next PhD application. It is not the end of the world. I applied a full-time position at A2I2 - one of the largest AI research institutes in Australia - and got an offer. It took me 2 months from the interview round with an interesting take-home problem to the onboarding day. It has been 6 months since I started working in the institute. Here, I meet many people and learn different pieces of knowledge from them. Also, I got an honour to work on several industrial projects that use AI to tackle real-world problems. Furthermore, I learned more about research, innovation and Defence principles.

2.3. More about my research journey

Back to research and development, I got an honour to work on research projects in various application areas such as finance, education, human resources and software engineering this year. It started with submitting the research paper about the expertise recommendation system that I and my colleagues had been working on since 2020. This is also the first research paper in my research career. Then, I and one of my colleagues started drafting the next research paper where I was the first author. It took us 2 months for the draft and finally got approved. This is the moment when I learned how difficult preparing and drafting a good research paper is.

At the same time, I and my other colleagues was working on another research paper on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Here, I feel grateful to have the opportunity to study deeply into next-gen technology. The work opens my eyes on how much people can achieve once a machine starts having its own ability to learn within the next 10 years. Aside from this, it was the first time when I prepared and wrote a comprehensive tutorial about DRL. It was challenging to come up with the novelty, prepare a draft, present it to people and convince other research fellows to contribute to the work. To me, this is one of the great learning activities that thrive me to the next research level that is the desire for the high-quality research.

In this early March, I and other colleagues kick-started the next research project which develops the end-to-end machine learning product to support the digital learning experience between teachers and students. It was the first time when I got a full control of designing the software architecture and developing the end-to-end machine learning product. By working on this project, I learned more about the education technology domain, working collaboratively with clients, other developers and research fellows, and conducting the real-time evaluation on the AI components by putting human in the loop. With all the efforts, we received the happiness of our clients on the outcome of the project. Furthermore, we submitted one research paper in the digital learning domain and got another one to be submitted. At the same time, we received another good news that is the approval of another research paper about applying AI in the financial sector that we had submitted since late 2020.

2.4. My personal projects

In the beginning of this year, I and my close friend from the U.S continued working on the project that we kick-started in September 2020. The mission of this project is offering a treatment to people who are suffering from mental health during this challenging pandemic. Although we had done the first prototype, we did not have much time to improvise it and move on to the next phase. Therefore, we unfortunately stop working on the idea. To me, this was a great experience when I and my close friend first time worked together for a decent amount of time, and I am sure that we learned a lot from each other during the journey.

At the same time, I was also trying to finish my new personal blog site with the aim of sharing knowledge about life, technology and research. After this, my motivation on writing blogs and reading books was back. I started thinking about blogging ideas and reading many different types of books.

Soon after that, I got an invite to collaborate and work on the mobile application as a proof-of-concept that applies AI into complement the way people listen to podcasts. The application named AudioPin and is current on the Beta version. I was working on the project for 3 months and learned a lot of things in terms of project management, client negotiation, teamwork and other technical concepts that bring machine learning components to the production environment. Here, we investigated deeply into AI techniques on processing speech and languages. It was challenging to apply such techniques with the shortage of computation sources (i.e., a huge number of GPUs). This motivated me to build the first high-end PC for experimenting AI components on my own - I have documented the journey in this blog post. By building the PC, I started developing my interest in understanding different hardware components that further helps me further understand different blockchain technologies.

Finally, I and one of my close friends in Australia have kick-started another project with the mission of improving the effectiveness and efficiency in knowledge generation and knowledge retrieval. We have been working hard during these few months to bring the idea into real life in the first quarter of next year.

3. Blogs and Books

This year, I have been reading less books than the previous years. However, I started thinking deeply into what has been taught in every book. I re-read books that I had completed previously, but this time I learned other new things from those books. Here are books that I read this year:

• The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg
• Hit Refresh - Satya Nadella
• The Age of Empathy - Fans de Waal
• Brief Answers to the Big Questions - Stephen Hawking
• The Right Kind of Crazy - Adam Steltzner
• Crazy Is a Compliment
• Invisibles - David Zweig
• Less is More - Jason Jennings
• Risk Savvy - Gerd Gigerenzer
• The Storyteller's Secret - Carmine Gallo
• Power Ambition Glory - Steve Forbes and John Prevas

To me, the best book for this year is "Hit Refresh" written by Satya Nadella because it has reframed my mindset in a good way. I start thinking in the growth mindset and being more empathic to people who I met. Here are my favourite keynotes taken from the book.

Don't be afraid to take a pause

Tomorrow always begins with a chance to create new opportunities

The best way to answer the hard questions about control in a world full of smart machines is by understanding the values of those who are actually building these systems.

On the other hand, I have started blogging again since this June. Most of the blog posts this year are about research and technology. There are still many interesting to be shared on my idea pocket.

4. The last word of the year

All of these wouldn't happen without the support of my mentors, my colleagues, my friends, and my loved ones. Again, I want to say thanks to everyone who is with me during this exciting journey of my life. There are challenges during the journey, but I always see and seek for the opportunities within each challenge, and that is the way I grow.

Don't be afraid to take a pause to reflect what has been done and share those pieces of knowledge with other people to help them grow.

Empathy is a key thing that thrives others.

Everything is a learning exercise that contributes to our large foundation of knowledge which we use for tackling real-world problems around us.

BONUS: The Future of Technology

Here are my beliefs on the future of technology within the next 10 years.

• A machine will start having its own ability to learn with less human efforts.

• Decentralisation is a trending topic, but it is still in its own development stage. Very soon, many decentralised applications in various areas will be available on the market. However, they are still under the control of governing policies.

• People are working on policies surrounding digital currencies for mass-production. Very soon, digital currencies will be part of human life from the society with low-income level to the high-income one.

• More and more applications using Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technology will be developed to transform the way we work, the way we live and the way we are educated.