- Diversity: As someone who has lived in three countries and has an appreciation for cultural differences, I embrace diversity in terms of demography, background knowledge, interest, and opinion.
- Cross-discplinarity: Most standing AI challenges cannot be solved purely by engineering. I am working hard to build bridges with other disciplines, including software engineering, cognitive psychology, social science, and linguistics.
- Motivation and guidance: I enjoy working with students and PostDocs. My firm belief is that with the right guidance and dedication, people can stay motivated and make substantial contribution while enjoying their work. I meet with each of my team members every week, and we communicate on slack in the meantime as needed.
- Growth: Growing at our job is important. I do my best to help each of my team members grow into a proud researcher with strong technical skills, robust conceptual understanding, and clarity toward applying the technology for good.
- Mistakes are good as long as we learn: It is normal to have knowledge gaps, make mistakes, etc. I try to learn from my mistakes and improve next time. I expect my colleagues to do the same.
- Teamwork and collaboration: Seeing science as a team sport, I have been actively seeking collaborations, resulting in effective co-supervision and co-organization with academics (USC, CMU, RPI, University of Lyon, VUA, UvA, University of Bielefeld) and industry partners (Bosch Research, NEC Labs, Merit Technologies, Tencent).
- Deliberate attitude: To have productive and meaningful working days, we need to be fully focused when we perform deep work. When we are not working, we should be equally determined to preserve the time and space for leisurely activities.
- Minimizing disruptions: The biggest challenge of productive and meaningful work are disruptions. I do my best to minimize disruptions both from and to me. I advise my team to do the same.
- Time management: I manage my time by setting and fulfilling goals, keeping track of my tasks and projects, and time blocking.
- Expectations: The academic work has many implicit expectations, which lead to overhead, frustrations, and distrust. I do my best to write all expectations down in an evolving google doc and discuss them with my team.
- Meeting preparation: I aim to come prepared for every meeting. It is respectful to my peers and makes the meetings more meaningful. I expect my students and collaborators to do the same.
- Curiosity: I do my best to feed my intellectual curiosity. I attend seminars, read papers, discuss, etc. in both formal and informal settings. There are infinite worlds to discover.
