How my research interest started

When I was in my teenage years, even while awaiting entry to the university, I have never had the slightest impression that I would become interested in the research field, let alone becoming a researcher. As was the rage during the late nineties, aspiring teenagers wanted to become dotcom entrepreneurs and I was one of them.

However, my aims and aspirations changed when I got my first taste of the research field. I was quite a good student up to my university years, judged by my academic and extra curricular results. However, something went amiss as I started my term in university. I simply could not find my footing. That was until the end of my third year, when students typically had their internships during the vacations. I was accepted as a research intern in the Mixed Reality Lab, and my view of research changed forever.

Life used to be about graduating with exemplary academic results and extra curricular activities from school, and landing that job which puts one on the fast track to success, or so the teenager perceives. However, being a researcher made me realize that the pursue of knowledge and the invention of new things can and do lead to a huge amount of satisfaction. The best thing that I derive from research is the opportunity to work with bright and brilliant minds from all walks of life. Even in the small community of my lab, there are researchers from many different countries and exhibit different thinking and personality. These different perspectives enabled me to expand my views and thinkings, and gave me the courage to believe in my own ability to pursue research.

In the beginning, I did not think that I would have the ability nor the intellect to be in this field. However, I was fortunate to have stumbled across the works of my current supervisor, Prof. Adrian David Cheok. After going through all the research works that he was working on, I gained interest. For me, it was his vision on research that finally convinced me that I had passion for research. Eventually, I developed the belief that this is what I like and this is what I can do. I learned that, as in every big obstacles in life, breaking things down into smaller parts and solving problems in incremental steps are very important methods in research. Most importantly, I realized I have the patience and perseverance for research as well.

Currently, my research interests lies in helping people to communicate, specifically people in remote locations. Current voice, textual and video communication tools have served us well in enabling remote persons to exchange information, be it work or private matters. However, such remote communication tools certainly lack the physical interaction present in daily person to person communication. In addition, current communication methods are sometimes inadequate for us to express our intended mind or feelings. Shapes, icons and color all play a part in giving expressions to the mundane messages being communicated day in and day out. I hope to find the effective communication tools and methods for the busy people of today to help them enhance their relationships with loved ones.

Fooled by Randomness

Recently, I read a very interesting book about probabilities (actually quite a comprehensive treatise on probabilistic applications on the real world), and how it applies to our lives, and in the financial market (particularly so). This book is by Nicholas Nassem Taleb.

The interesting point is that, the author goes about illustrating how not only the common people, but specialists and professionals in their jobs would go about making absurd claims which are counter to what statistics and probability could tell us. I suppose this book would be more understandable and readable to the person more in tune with mathematics and computer programming, as most concepts are gathered from here.

However, simple examples are often used to highlight how people make fools of themselves. The author mentions that, journalists are actually entertainers, paid to entertain us with daily doses of insignificant events (or what a signal engineer would consider noise).

One important concept to illustrate of how he thinks traders are foolish. He claims that people are more prone to enjoy making small profits, daily, than to look at the expected profits in the longer term. Traders, or people who buy and sell securities and options, tend to be not open to the idea of losing small but making big. Instead, they multiply the small amount of profit to be made by making big bets. These are what lead to blow ups, situations where people make huge losses which they can no longer tolerate, emotionally and monetarily. It is a given that there are black swan events in the real world, especially so in the financial markets.

What are black swans? Consider this claim, "All swans are white" made by a person after observing say maybe all the different lakes available in the US. Can this claim be 100% true? It definitely cannot be, as what he has not observed does not give a confirmation that the un-observed event or thing is not present. It takes only 1 black swan to negate the claim.

Similarly, people in the financial markets tend to make absurd forecasts on the market based on past data. Can we say that we know everything about the market just by looking at (the maximum) all the historically available data and derive a causality to pinpoint the market direction tomorrow? Furthermore, the author also claims, most of the time, so called financial analysts or economists tend to retrofit explanations unto past data. Well, this is a very serious flaw, as it means anyone can come up with anything that sounds reasonable to the 'conventional thinking' to explain past data. Journalists in particular, who are not trained in these specific fields (like finance, mathematics, medicine, engineering), tend to oversimplify and over assume numbers and results.

Back to the main concept, so the author believes that since there are black swan events in the market (2 examples are the 1997 crisis, and the 9/11 attack), events that cannot be predicted, yet lead to severe market downfall, we should not overestimate our knowledge of the market. And his strategy is to profit from these events.