Welcome to my Medium page! Where I document my insights and share the things I learn to hopefully add value to your life. What are the things I might share about? Here's my bio to give you an idea:

My Talent Stack:

(Learn more about "Talent Stack" here).

Data and Tech (Python Development, Statistics, Cloud Infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, etc),Communication, Leadership (working cross-collaboratively), Design and Artistic Sense, Value-Driven, Language Learner.

Let’s talk about that last one. What does such a weird talent called “Language Learner” have to offer? Well, everything.

If there’s one concept that can beautifully consolidate the entirety of my identity, it’s this idea of languages. I am a man of languages.

There’s a saying: if you want to control what people think, control the words they say. Our words are our thoughts.

In North Korea, they don’t have a word for love in North Korea. The only example is a word that describes love for their supreme leader. In ancient Sparta, “freedom” did not exist as a concept, not even as a word.

Word elimination becomes thought elimination.

Language also helps you connect with people in a way that you couldn’t without knowing the language.

But my definition of language, and why it’s so meaningful to me, it’s deeper than this. Yes, I can speak English, Indonesian, and Mandarin fluently. But here’s what I mean:

You may know English. But talk with a Wall Street stock trader. He will talk about stuff Wall Street traders usually talk about, resistance lines, volume, price action, and wild metrics like the RSI in the rules he set out for himself in his trading career. Could you speak to him in his language of trading?

Or talk with a professor who has learned music all his life about a lecture he has taught. If he assumes you know the language of music, he may talk about dynamics, importance of performing with the right rhythm, how the cadence in that song you heard in your favorite video game was a genius for using fifths to create an eerie atmosphere. It’s a foreign language if you haven’t been exposed to it.

I find joy in learning to speak the languages of a wide array of people.

My criteria for being able to speak a language is the ability to have a deep conversation in a way that ignites the sparks in a passionate master of that field, which I will simply refer to as a native speaker.

Following this principle, here are my languages:

♟ Chess 🏓 Table Tennis 🤖 AI 🎹 Classical and Improv Piano 🎧 Music Production 💡Entrepreneurship 🎥 Content Creation 🗣 Conversational Interfaces 💰Finance, Crypto, Blockchain

The level above being able to speak the language is to live within a culture. We are all familiar with the significance of culture in the traditional sense, but I think the very same idea can be applied to learning. Because I am able to speak the languages above, I am more freely able to experience the cultures within each. Each culture impacts the way I live and think.

I view the acquisition of new skill really as language learning. With whatever skill I learn, I want to be able to talk fluently with a native speaker of that language. In any class I go to in school, my primary goal is not: “get an A in the class”. It’s: If I can’t have an actual meaningful conversation with the professor or an expert in the field about this topic, then I have failed the class.

It’s a paradigm shift for sure, but one that I found more fulfilling and is a better goal. Because again, being able to speak the language of that class also means I get to delve into the “culture” of the class and experience personal, lifelong, deep, daily-level changes. I have learned Mandarin from scratch 3 years ago. I lived in a small suburb in Beijing with a modest family for three months, wholly immersed in the life in China. Living in the middle of many cultures as somebody who also grew up as a Chinese-Indonesian in Indonesia and went to college in the States with over 100 countries represented, I am intimately familiar the power culture has to impact behavior.

When learning something, it’s too easy to only memorize things and not immerse yourself in the culture of whatever you are learning.

By trying to learn to speak a language, you are forced to think at a higher level because more than mere memorization, you have to connect bigger picture ideas together and do a mental sort of the priorities of each. Why is the concept significant? How can it be used?

Getting good at the process of learning languages is something I am passionate about, and I feel I have made a lot of progress in.

The cherry on top is: I am also interested in linguistics and how a computer understands language.

Text is basically data. Being a lover of language, Natural Language Processing has been my favorite branch of AI. Even more in love with human interactions, I am even more interested with how to automagically make language interface with humans. That's why I'm also big on Conversational AI and see it as one of the natural and effective ways humans will do things in the future.