Image courtesy of Amanda from our trip to Colca Canyon in Peru

Welcome to my personal blog: The Art of Connecting! We’ll see how long the name sticks. It doesn’t mean that I’m an expert when it comes to connecting, but rather, it’s more of an ambition: to become better at connecting! By connecting, I interpret this as connecting disparate data, different insights, different people, and different mindsets into a holistic nuanced understanding. It’s a large and complicated goal, but at least that means I will have plenty to write about. I envision this blog serving two purposes:

1. This blog primarily serves as a place where I can organize my thoughts on my professional and technical development.
2. As a secondary goal, I hope this blog can provide clarity into my approach, the outcomes, and my insights so people can learn from, provide feedback on, or generally discuss about these experiences.

I will primarily focus on both soft and technical skills to develop my goal of Connecting:

• Languages: An obvious way of connecting with people is to learn their language. This not only permits hear an individual’s stories, but it also grants incredible insights into the cultural value system and mindset. Fortunately, this involves ingesting a lot of different media (e.g. music, movies, TV, etc.), so the process is both intellectually and emotionally satisfying.
• Graph Analytics: It’s commonly understood that the world is a vast and complicated place; everything is extremely interconnected. However, that’s not to say that it’s entirely opaque and unpredictable. I plan on leveraging graph analytics and related methods (e.g. Pearl’s Causal Inference) to create relationship-centric data insights.
• Natural Language: Human language is how we humans communicate for the most part; it’s how we relay our stories and even shape our own thoughts (as suggested by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of Language Relativity. However, Natural Language is not clean an orderly; there’s a certain level of inherent ambiguity. Nowadays, there are great ways to retrieve information from Natural Language! These methods fall within two schools of thought: a AI driven view (Yann LeCun) and a linguistic view (Christopher Manning). I’ve included a personally-formative video below of their discussion.
  
• Ecology/Microbiota: There’s no greater nor more impactful example of connectedness than ecology in my mind. The study of natural communities and their delicate relationships and balances is critical to create sustainable processes and ultimately greatly raise the quality of life over time. I’ve recently been particularly fascinated by fungi, archaea, and bacteria’s role in all ecologies. This book The Entangled Life invited me into this realm of thought and strongly emphasized the vastly understudied realm of fungi and the vastly under-appreciated efforts of fungi and bacteria in crops and personal health.

I will consolidate my current knowledge on these 4 topics among others (e.g. health care, food) and update this site whenever I find any new information.