Had a chance to go back to Vietnam last summer. There’s really no place like home, because home is where you can find the most amount of love. The whole two months went by like a breeze. But I’m glad that I managed to do most of what I wanted to before the summer. Let’s review the bucket list.

a lot of time chilling with my parents and sister

Yeah I did :)

a lot of ultimate with Fulbright Ultimate Club

I had precisely one practice with FUC :) (and another one with NTC Nha Trang). It was a warm encounter with a wholesome group of folks who I learned to play ultimate with. Compared to last year, I touched the disc more, passed more, scored more, and defended more effectively. But there was still a lot to work on.

Very blurry view of our fun throwing on Nha Trang beach

Beside FUC, it was even nicer that I was able to throw with many people. In particular, I threw with:

As such, the frisbee disc has accompanied me in meeting many people and seeing many beautiful places. It’s fair to say that, if I was with someone and I threw a disc with them, that means they are a good friend of mine. Similarly, if I was somewhere and I threw a frisbee disc, that was a pretty cool place.

a lot of time hanging out with my favorite people in Saigon

My average day of commuting to see friends

Beside those that I meet over frisbee, there were many more deliberate meetups with my college friends, highschool friends, and career mentors. Some are technical and nerdy, while others are liberal and creative. Some resulted in very cosy home-cooked meals, while others are formal talks at fancy restaurants. All of the encounters helped me flex the corresponding brain muscles that I have not used much last year.

working on an exciting Machine Learning project

Breakfast at work

I spent a good amount of time to do this project with a very wise mentor who is a veteran in AI applications. This NDA-ed project is about leveraging state-of-the-art models for processing satellite images. (Yes, satellite images for a map lover like me.) It was a chance to learn some very cool stuff such as using cloud services (Azure’s VM, AI Studio, Blob Storage; AWS’s RDS; Google Maps API), CV annotation tools (Roboflow, V7labs, CVAT, LabelStudio), data-app building framework (Streamlit, Gradle, Dash).

attending ACL, the world’s biggest NLP conference, in August, with my advisor!

Sunset on my way from D7 to D2

I ended up unable to go. Interestingly, right after ACL, Fulbright hosted an AI summit right in Ho Chi Minh City, with the appearance of Jeff Dean (Google), Quoc Le (Google), and other NLP researchers. Due to my flight schedule, I also missed that :).

a lot of time thinking about the next steps for my dissertation + talking with the undergrad prof who inspired me about this current topic

I managed to meet the undergrad prof right before my flight back. He helped put more context into the scholarship of memes. He also reminded me to be critical of how disconnected computational research on these social topics are from the body of work by phisophers and social scientists. Overall, nothing major was changed about my research direction – I am still planning to work on memes during my entire PhD.

Sky view from the mirror of my scooter, where you can also see the green helmet that I am very much emotionally attached to. I rest assured that wherever I go, the sky will always be that pretty.

Now let’s get back to the uninteresting city of Dallas and do some good work!