Mindful Calmness from Sufferings

 A couple of days ago, I played a piece of music titled "Moon Reflected on the Second Spring," composed by Hua Yanjun. While the piece was originally written for the Erhu—a Chinese two-stringed fiddle, I played it on the xiao.

The composer, Hua Yanjun, was the illegitimate son of a Taoist abbot and the wife of a rich man. Abandoned by his mother’s family, he was raised and trained in music by his biological father, who kept their true relationship a secret from everyone—including Hua Yanjun himself—until just before his father’s death. Shortly after his father passed away, Hua Yanjun became the temple's abbot. However, he later contracted sexually transmitted infections from frequenting prostitutes, which severely damaged his vision and eventually left him blind. Later he turned to begging and busking on the streets every day.

Originally, this musical masterpiece had no title; the composer simply described it as a reflection of his inner mind. Because of the immense hardships he endured, most listeners believe the music expresses a profound sadness. I look at it differently — he’s in fact using music to pursuit the inner calmness that countered life's chaotic disturbances.

Ultimately, once the mind finds true peace, the weight of all suffering fades into nothingness.

Right Or Wrong

 A little more than ten years ago, when I was participating in a research project on process mining, Moe, my supervisor, told me that we needed a presentation for a few business stakeholders later that day. "I would like you to have a try as this is a practice for you." she told me in the morning when I had just come into the office. "What should we put on the PowerPoint slides?" I asked. "Our project is about cross-organisational comparative process mining," she explained. "Our business partners want to compare each other's ways of handling business processes, so that they can know how they perform compared to organisations in the same industry, and thus they can learn from each other. Today people from a public organisation will be at the presentation, and they are keen to know how competitive their performance is compared to private organisations in the same industry."

"But I'm still confused," I said. "How do we measure performance? I mean there are too many dimensions to compare."

"We only use the processing time, as it is impossible for us to compare based on other criteria."

I hurried to prepare a few PPT slides which showed the results based on my analysis from the past few weeks. After greetings with the people from our business partner, Moe introduced me, and then I showed them the PPT slides.

"It is clear from the figures that your organisation is handling the business processes significantly slower than the private counterparts," I presented.

"It's impossible!" one person from the business partner interrupted. "I've done research internally, and it doesn't look like what you presented. It must be wrong."

"I don't believe the results to be true," the manager from the business partner added.

"Sorry, he just graduated," Dr. Moe Wynn spoke up. "I think he's made a mistake. Nevertheless, he's quite new to this area, as he has just started in process mining research since last year. His understanding is still not so well."

"I am very confident of the results and what I’ve done." I argued. "I've done it several times to ensure the correctness, and..."

That afternoon, I was blamed heavily in the office of Arthur, who was the disciplinary leader. Then I can still clearly remember almost every word from a statement that he said, "Your understanding of the theory is correct. Your approach to investigation is scientific. Your results are objective and true. But your results make the business partner very upset, which will have a very negative impact on the university, as that public organisation is the one that provides funding to this research. Therefore, we have to make them happy.  While Moe said you were wrong, she had softened the influence of your harmful words. But you still argued with her..." I was shocked and couldn’t believe this was spoken from Arthur’s mouth. 

I felt puzzled. Was I really wrong? Or were they wrong instead？ I told my parents that evening that I felt I'd been bullied.

"They were just teaching you," my parents said. "You're a fresh graduate, and they have experience, so they want to help you. There’s no motivation for them to hurt you."

Half a year later, I recounted this story to one of my best friends during my visit to Hangzhou. "I made a very big mistake," I said sadly.

"No, you're not at fault," he said.

"Really? But everyone said I was wrong."

"From a research perspective, you're correct," my friend replied. "But for the career development of yourself, this is not good." Then he sighed. "Maybe it will be better if you just view it as being wrong, as I really hope you can live easier and have a better career development."

“Research is not suitable for you.” He added, “why not try something easier and more comfortable?”

My Journey to Painting

Yesterday, while my young boy was sleeping in the afternoon, I brought my pen kit and fountain pen to the bedroom to draw a picture of "A Sleeping Boy." I was very pleased to see that my skills in drawing from life had been recovered and were even better than when I was a teenager.

I started painting at a very young age. Throughout my childhood, I had very few toys. Trapped in an apartment with cement walls when I had just moved from a rural to an urban area, drawing was one of the few activities that I could enjoy to spend my spare time. Later, my primary school offered some extracurricular activities, and I chose painting. From then on, every Saturday, I would go to an art room to study drawing and painting. There were quite a lot of students in the room, but most of them could not focus on the activities for the whole morning, whereas I was different. Especially when we came to the open air to sketch from life, many children just ran away to play games they liked. I didn't run away because painting was already my favorite activity.

Because of this, the teacher always paid more attention to me. I remember that I was the one who received most of his mentorship. While I was drawing either a tree or a flower, he would try to sit next to me, instructing me how to draw. Occasionally, he asked me to stop and demonstrated to me how to draw.

He said to us, "Watercolor will be a bit too challenging for you. I think you can use gouache because once you've made a mistake, you can just apply a new layer with the new color on top. You can't do this with watercolor, and this is why I don't recommend you start with watercolor." He taught us how to mix colors based on primary colors. Since most students studied casually, he spent more time teaching me, and in most cases, in a one-on-one manner.

During those years, I spent almost all my spare time painting. My academic performance was always very poor, but I did not care about it that much. In the back of my mind, I thought it might be a good excuse to learn fine arts in the future and launch a career as a painter.

Every birthday, I would receive presents about painting, such as a painting brush, a new set of pigments, and a book. There was once a book exhibition held in the city where I lived, and my sister bought a book about Chinese Landscape Painting Techniques. This became the best book I had ever read. I bought traditional ink, paper, and pigments to paint Chinese-style paintings too.

My academic performance improved a lot starting in Grade Six, the final year of primary school. Since then, I had gradually given up painting, though I still tried new styles and techniques occasionally. During my university years in Xi'an, I occasionally did pencil drawing sketches. Then, this hobby was fully abandoned once I came to Australia.

Since last year, I picked up my pen and brush again and resumed this hobby. I'm glad my capacity has basically recovered.

Zero Is Larger Than Negative

 IT companies such as Microsoft and Amazon recently announced job cuts, claiming the cause to be Artificial Intelligence. However, I believe it is merely their technical advertising strategy to promote their AI-related products. Don't panic, as I don't think AI can really replace that many jobs in the foreseeable future.

I can still clearly remember that during my presentation at an international conference on video surveillance in 2012, a representative from a UK-based company told me that their company had spent quite a lot to investigate automatic video event detection systems. However, they later found out that all the methods proposed in recent publications were rubbish, as none of them could really be used in the real world. I felt embarrassed and changed my research direction after returning to Australia. I examined publications in this field and found that a lot of papers did not have any quantitative evaluations, and the sizes of the datasets were far from enough.

On a Sunday afternoon, I came to the lab at our university to study. My classmate from Sri Lanka said, "You are an excellent student. But it is a pity that you're supervised by Dr. Simon Denman. If you had the opportunity to work with Professor Simon Lucey, I believe you could have much more high-quality publications."

"No," I said, "I'm more fortunate to be guided by Simon Denman." Then I continued, "Simon Lucey's papers look good, but I don't like his style of research. He always first has an idea built on a tough mathematical foundation, and then asks students to do the development and experiments."

"So what's the problem?" my classmate asked.

"The problem is he gives his students too much pressure. They have to have good-looking results, otherwise, they will be blamed because the papers cannot be published in top venues," I said.

"But I'm still confused. What is the problem with that?" he asked.

"I believe research is full of uncertainties," I said, "as we are exploring an uncertain world." Then I continued, "I believe we should have at least some degree of freedom to adjust the methodology during the process."

A few years later, I was in Shenzhen undertaking a research project for Wi-Fi sensing, which means detecting human activities using information from communication channels. I resigned and left Shenzhen without any publications a couple of years later. I am proud of this, as no papers mean the best outcome. This is because zero is always larger than negative.

For all existing papers in this area, the arguments are contradictory. They all argued that using Wi-Fi signals was motivated by the fact that they could resist occlusion and even go through walls, while they hadn't explained how they prevented the influence of activities outside the room of the experiments.

The same problem exists in process mining. To evaluate whether a business process model is fine or not, researchers usually interview business users and directly ask them for verification. But how do we know they are not lying?

If the research outcomes of AI are not objective or true, why are we so scared of its influence in the current era? The spring of AI has yet to come.

An Attempt

 Last night, I drew a picture called "On the Bank." It is based on scenery I saw while walking along the riverbank of the City Botanical Garden. It is an ink and wash painting. From a technical perspective, I combined fountain pen drawing and brush painting techniques.

Sumi ink and water are the painting materials. The fountain pen is used as a dip pen; I dip it into ink mixed with various levels of water to draw fine details, whereas the brush is used to paint the backgrounds and loose parts.

Frankly speaking, I was not satisfied with the result when I finished it. However, it was an attempt that provided me with valuable experience. In traditional Chinese culture, ink and wash painting is usually performed by scholars as a type of literati art. I think that for people living in the modern world, we have stationeries and lifestyles which are distinctive from those of ancient times. To reflect the lives and minds of modern people, we have to try new approaches. Even the failure of an attempt is meaningful.

Under The Peepal Tree

 A few days ago, when I was working in the Brisbane CBD, I took a walk after lunch in the nearby City Botanic Gardens. I saw a few people gathered around a table under a giant peepal tree. The scenery was very familiar to me, as if I had encountered this view before. I then remembered that I saw a picture called "Under the Jacaranda" in the state museum. That historically famous painting was about a few people gathering under a jacaranda tree. After I came home in the evening, I couldn't help but paint a watercolour painting called "Under the Peepal Tree".

I've known this giant tree since I studied at QUT in 2009. At first, I didn't know the name of the species. During the summer holiday, when I was developing C-YAWL in the BPM team, a friend told me that it was, in fact, a peepal tree.

"Do you know that the peepal tree is very special?" he asked.

"I don't know much, but I have heard the name in many Buddhist stories," I said.

"Yes, Buddha was enlightened while he was meditating under a peepal tree. But from a biological point of view, it is also very special. See the shape of the leaves? All other plants with leaves in this shape grow in a vine form, and the peepal tree is the only species that has leaves like that but grows in a canopy tree form. Next time you don't know how to write a paper, try coming here!"

I'm not sure whether the tree can enlighten me when I have puzzles. But this is one of the biggest trees that I have ever seen, and reading in its shadow is very enjoyable.

Hometown

Yesterday, I picked up my concert flute, which I hadn't used for a long time, to play a Japanese melody called "The Original Scenery of Hometown." As usual, I wanted to dissolve my sentiments into the music. I couldn't help but think of my hometown, though I still couldn't identify exactly where it was.

"Hometown" is always a confusing word to me. To my parents, it usually means the rural village where we lived before. However, I don't have much of an impression of those days because I moved to an urban area at the age of four. I usually consider the neighborhood I lived in within that urban area to be my hometown. It is the place where I can recall many stories from my childhood. It is where our family's previous store was located, where my junior high school was, and where my former neighbors—including my parents-in-law—used to live or currently still living.

A couple of months ago, I visited there with my family. A distinct change was that the empty space between my old apartment building and my in-laws' building has now become a car park. I missed the old days a little bit, when seniors could sit under the trees chatting with friends, and children, including me and my brother-in-law, could play various games.

For a very long time, when we talked about hometowns, we meant my mother's maiden hometown—the village she lived in before marriage. In the past, my granny lived alone in that village. Every school holiday, I would spend two to three weeks there. I liked living in the countryside, where you could see blue skies, white clouds, green trees, ponds, insects and animals just by walking out of your home. Granny raised a tortoise, and I often fed it carrots and porks. She also had a longan tree, which was said to have been planted by my granddad's parents. I envied the children living in the countryside because they could connect with nature easily. Meanwhile, I could only sit lonely on the balcony and it was the only place I could feel a little of the natural world.

Xi'an is another city that I was once attached to. However, the Xi'an I really liked belongs to the past, which has been gone for a very long time—for twenty years now.