Education
I love to use knowledge to excite and inspire younger students. Other than my 1-1 mentoring and tutoring experiences. I spent a whole year teaching English in a rural area in Taiwan. At the college and graduate level, I have also taught a few lectures and hosted office hours. I enjoy designing and implementing interactive activities to engage students in my classroom.
Machine Learning
I started to study machine learning through the Coursera course offered by Standford professor Professor Andrew Ng. I am always following the trend in machine learning and see if I can use some knowledge for my fire ant research! Recently, I have used amazing deep learning packages such as DeepLabCut and SLEAP to track the movement of animal limbs.
On a side note, despite the common hype on machine learning among the scientific community, I am frequently told to use discretion by my sister Irene Ko, who studies machine learning robustness at MIT as a graduate student.
Mechatronics Systems and Robotics
I enjoyed learning and incorporating knowledge from different fields when designing robots. I am very proud of the most sophisticated robot I’ve made so far: an autonomous hockey-playing robot that can find and shoot the puck towards the goal! A list of the mechatronics projects I have worked on can be found here on YouTube.
Data and network science
My interest in data science traced back to my sophomore year in college when I was about to join a research project on social media modeling based on the complex network dynamic theory. While I ended up joining a different lab (traffic flow project!), the readings I did for this project left a deep impression.
The scale-free nature of the networks is truly fascinating. As I slowly enter the world of complex systems, I am thrill to meet some of the pioneers in this field!
Music
Music is one of my favorite hobbies. I started to write songs a while ago and hopefully I will continue to write them! Some of the songs I wrote have been uploaded on my YouTube channel.
Language
I am a big fan of languages too. I think language is the most important key to understanding a culture.
Aside from Mandarin, my mother tongue, and English, I can speak fluently in Japanese. I also learned some German, Spanish, and Tibetan simply for the fun of it. I love how sentences are arranged differently in different languages. It shows how arbitrary language really is. There are many ways to communicate information.
If an ant can learn many pheromone languages of the insect world, I imagine she would be surprised too!
Community Service
I am always enthusiastic about making contributions to the communities and society around us. I look up to the kind of person who is not only brilliant in his/her field but is also capable of bringing success to the people around him/her.
One of my most recent volunteering experiences is leading science projects as a mentor in Philadelphia local schools. The program was facilitated by iPraxis, which was founded because the minority groups are highly underrepresented in scientific communities, especially in medicine-related fields.
In Atlanta, I have been volunteering for Georgia Aquarium since October 2018. I love to amaze the visitors, young or old, with facts on marine animals and show them the importance of conservation.