To Infinity and Beyond

   “To Infinity and Beyond!”, a simple and quite childish catchphrase from the Toy Story series, influenced me and guides me through the hardships and puzzles life throws at me. It all started when I was 5 years old, watching Toy Story 1 at kindergarten. It wasn’t my favorite animation (I liked Finding Nemo way better), but Buzz Lightyear’s “To Infinity and Beyond” just won’t come out of my head. It woke the ambitions and creativity of the young mind, urging the little boy to push his limits and change the world. Since then, I refused to follow the path others have already made. This turned out to be very challenging as I faced reality, but still I have not once regretted my way of life.

    One thing that interested the odd boy was computer. To admit, I am no mechanic (I break things better than fixing them). Still, I was dragged to scientific fiction, much more than my friends, and always dreamed of making my own R2-D2. As I grew up, I learned about machine learning and the impossible projects that machine learning makes possible, I just couldn’t resist to dig into the field. The way algorithms I coded worked was fascinating; it would’ve took a millennia to solve the problems the computer broke down like a piece of cake in a single second. Numerous errors that hit me were just an entertaining challenge for me. Indeed, what fun it would be to shoot a ball into a goal without a goalkeeper? But, this wasn’t enough to be the “infinity and beyond” for me. Now I wanted to do bigger things: achievements that provide answers for real-life issues. My first and still-developing project is Babytalk, an application to analyze baby’s crying videos using computer vision and convolutional ceural network, a type of deep learning algorithm, and figure out what the baby tries to communicate. Whether it will work with high accuracy or not, I don’t know. But this is my first step to the infinity and impossible, and it will take a lot more than failure to stop me from progressing. Now, I am simultaneously working on 4 projects, all of which are seemingly impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, my limits of today is traveling beyond anything that I thought of yesterday in my career. One day, when my adventure of this career flies pass KMLA and university, I hope I will be able to extend the limits of not just me, but the whole world.

    Another thing that interests me are books. I’m not a wide-scale reader, since I only enjoy fiction. Especially, fantasy and science fiction genre are my favorites. When the main character travels to a mystical world or meets god from mythology, I get absorbed into the story and can’t pull myself out until the book ends. People tell me I am a creative young man, and I would say 99.9% of the cause is reading these books. One of the favorite series is the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, where Greek mythology mixes with American culture (I'll introduce this series in another whole essay later). I like scribbling my own fantasy world and writing an exciting adventure, though I never succeed in finishing it (the climax always get so off-track, I don’t know why). Still, I believe that I would one day make a decent fantasy novel and present it proudly to others.