My Lifelong Passion Is Nature

 After a couple of years of playing flutes made of metal or plastic, I eventually switched back to bamboo flutes. I feel that bamboo flutes have some earthy characteristics that cannot be matched by flutes made of other materials, despite they have their own challenges, such as that pitch accuracy is harder to be achieved due to the natural variations of bamboo. Those natural variations, from another perspective, give unique features to each individual instrument, as if filling the musical instrument with a soul.

I am always keen to enjoy nature in the countryside, even though I grew up mainly in an urban area. I like the fresh air, the green mountains, the rivers, the insects, the animals, and even the soil, which are hard to see or touch if you are living in a city. When I was at university, I once saw photos from a classmate who was from a village in northwestern China. There was a small cottage in a mountainous area, with a lot of corns and chili peppers on the wall outside. All of them attracted me, but I was most interested in a bull sitting in front of the house. "Have you ridden on it?" I asked with full curiosity. I envied those who grew up in rural or mountainous areas, despite people said life was not easy there.

Especially when I was living in the university dormitory, I had a roommate who was from Guizhou Province, and he told me that he had to swim across a river to school when he was young. I felt it a bit scary and dangerous, but in my deeper mind I felt it was also romantic and attractive.

Throughout my childhood, I could only experience much of the country life during school holidays with my maternal grandma, who lived in a quiet village before moving to Hong Kong. Every morning, Grandma would take me to the marketplace to buy food for lunch and dinner, as well as to have breakfast in a restaurant. When we arrived home, I used to play under the star fruit tree near the house. I favoured the evening most, with a stunning starry night and sounds by insects and frogs. Usually, there would be grandpas and grandmas living nearby coming to our home to play dominoes. If not, Grandma would tell me lots of stories of the old days of her own life.

Twenty years ago, I went to Hong Kong to visit Grandma and Grandpa. Grandma told me that, throughout her life, the happiest time was when she was living in her hometown village and I went to spend my school holidays there.

When I was young, I used to study painting from a book about Chinese Landscape Painting Techniques. There was a chapter about learning from nature. "Learning from nature" is still my principle of art practice, but it is not limited to painting. I applied it to music and literature too.

The opera The Peony Pavilion, written by Tang Xianzu is one of my favourite literature. In an episode, when the main character, Du Liniang, came to a garden in spring, she couldn't help but say, "My lifelong passion is nature!" And so is mine.

The First Splash

In 2009, when I first studied computer science in Australia after obtaining an undergraduate degree in telecommunications engineering, I felt a bit uneasy as the summer holiday was approaching. The summer holiday in Australia was too long, and it would be too boring if I couldn't find something interesting to do. 

Paul asked me whether I would like to continue a project about microphone arrays in his lab. I refused, and accepted Marcello's invitation to develop the process configuration component in YAWL — Yet Another Workflow Language. 

Marcello was a young lecturer in the Enterprise Software Architecture unit, which taught component software and service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"Let me introduce you to my team." He led me to an office on Margrete Street. "Our team is called the Business Process Management Group, focusing on process-centric services. It is the largest team in this area in Australia." 

I had read quite a lot in this area, but this was the only time a teacher had linked Business Process Management with process-centric services in SOA, which was quite innovative. 

He introduced me to members there, such as Michael, Moe and Chun, and finally led me to meet Arthur, who led the group.

He gave me some documents and explained the basic concepts. "Please be aware that these documents include chapters from books that are ready to be published. Please do not share them with others." 

A few days later, when I arrived at the office, he asked me about my understanding of process configuration. 

"I think it is about generating simpler process models from a big model that includes everything, by blocking some gates," I said. 

"Basically correct," he said. "Yeah, I had some friends in China investigating how to strip driver components from a Linux operating system, and select only the driver software components that are required. I think the concept is quite similar!"

After I set up the development platform in Java, Marcello told me he would be traveling to Italy. 

"No worries if you encounter problems. Arthur and Michael will support you."

The first big problem I encountered was to find out which paths were affected when a user blocked a gate in YAWL. For each activity, it has input and output ports, and arcs connect output ports to input ports of the next activities. So to find the affected path, I had to trace the flow. 

Then I started thinking: if I blocked an output port, the arc that stretched from this port would be blocked, and it would not reach the input port it was connected to in the next activity. 

This pattern was familiar to me — it was the problem of finding dependencies in database design!

An output arc was always dependent on an output port, whereas an input port was always dependent on an input arc. The output arc for one port was always the input arc for another.

"Ah, I see. I should use the closure set algorithm from database design," I said to myself.

In the following weekly meeting of the research group, I consulted Arthur about this idea. 

"Yes. This is a way to solve the problem," Arthur responded immediately. "There are many similar applications. Some people call it the bounding box theory."

After Arthur confirmed it, I gained the confidence to start the development. Michael shared the YAWL architecture documents with me. Almost every day, I stayed in the office until 9 pm.

After the Christmas and New Year break, Marcello came back to Brisbane. I cheerfully showed him my work. 

"No. The OR-split should not be implemented like that." He corrected some of my mistakes, and I adjusted those errors in the source code.

After seeing that I had finished everything we discussed at the start of the project, Marcello asked me, "Do you want to co-author a paper with us?"

"A paper?" I couldn't believe I would have the opportunity to write a paper. 

"Yes!" I said firmly.

Then he printed out a draft of an article explaining that after configuration, a process model could contain deadlocks and livelocks, so we had to verify its correctness. He taught me the concept of Petri nets and explained what the idea in the paper was and what I should do.

Three weeks later, I gave a presentation to the team. When I finished, everyone kept silent. This continued for about a minute. Then one of them clapped. Soon all members were clapping loudly. 

"Your presentation is almost perfect!" Marcello said to me.

"I'm surprised that you've done so well!" Arthur walked to my desk and congratulated me. "Do you want to do another project in the coming semester?" he asked.

"No," I told him. "I'm applying for a scholarship in the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, so I will be taking some subjects there."

"Our faculty has scholarships too!" Arthur said. 

"No. I tried before, but they said my undergraduate degree wasn't in computer science, so I can't qualify for a scholarship," I replied.

"I'm surprised you weren't studying computer science before. What you've done in two months is equivalent to what an average PhD student does in two years, and the quality is even higher!" Arthur said.

Do They Really Think The Swan Ugly

Eden Lake, located in the suburb of North Lakes, is a place my family often visits. It is a beautiful lake in a quiet area. 

We are used to leaning on the fence in front of a café and admiring the view that stretches to the distant mountains and forests. There is a lot of water-based wildlife, including ducks, tortoises, fish, and the most outstanding ones — swans. 

"Look! Swans! See the beautiful black swans!" Many children were cheering and bouncing on the lookout platform when they saw the swans. 

Suddenly I saw a few lonely, grey, duck-like animals following a big black swan in the water. 

"Ah, I see! They're baby swans!" I pointed to them and waved to my sons. "Look! We can see baby swans!" 

Then I expanded on the topic and said, "Do you know that once upon a time there was a baby swan hatched by a mother duck?" 

"Yes. That's the story of The Ugly Duckling," my son said. 

"But I think they're nice," I said. 

"Yes, they're cute," my elder son said. 

"So cute!" my younger son said.

I suddenly fell into contemplation. Why, in the story of The Ugly Duckling, did everyone say the little swan was ugly? Was he really ugly? Did they really believe he was ugly? 

The other little ducklings didn't know him to be a swan, which is quite understandable. However, hadn't the mother and the other grown-ups known he was a swan?

What is the definition of "ugly"? What is "beautiful"? 

These are the two most subjective terms. We only know what we think, but we can't really know what others think. We know what others say, but we can't know if they're telling the truth.

I think what happened on the farm was a bullying event. The Mother Duck should have already known the ugly duckling was not her child, and that was probably why she couldn't protect him. Or maybe she was unwilling to do so. She wanted to get rid of him but pretended to be nice. 

In that story, those animals who called the little swan ugly might not have really thought he was ugly. Some might have just followed others to bully him. Some might have thought he didn't belong to their group. Some thought he threatened their interests. What's more, some may have even envied him for being a swan.

I raised my head to look into the distance. A gleam of sunshine was reflecting on the lake. The group of swans had swum away, leaving the ducks playing near the edge. 

A black swan suddenly flew to the bank and stood near me, as if he was greeting me. 

"Thank you!" I said to him. 

People might be astonished if they heard what I said. But no one knows that I understood a lot through the swans — about the fairy tale, and about life!

Modern Literati Arts

Literati arts are very significant in China’s art history. From Tang Dynasty’s Wang Wei, literati paintings have gradually become the mainstream in China’s painting history. The techniques are still strongly influencing today’s painting practice in China. However, in today’s Chinese paintings, we can merely see the technical influence of historical literati paintings, but the spirit has been lost. This is similar for music. Folk instruments such as the guzheng and dizi have flourished with quite a number of modern repertoires, whereas instruments for literati music, mainly the guqin and dongxiao, have lost attention.

There are many reasons contributing to this. The influence of Western culture, of course, accounts for it to a great extent. However, the more direct reason is the way of modern life. Today literati are no longer a group that focuses on literature and social science. They also include scholars, academics, engineers, and officers from a large number of disciplines. Meanwhile, paintings and music are conducted by professional painters and musicians rather than literati who are not professional artists. They can easily inherit the techniques, but it is hard to inherit the inner spirit. 

This drives me to think of new approaches for literati arts. 

Yesterday, I painted a picture about an ibis eating crumbs on a dining table. The ibis was rendered with traditional Chinese expression painting skills, whereas other objects and the background were painted with Western watercolor skills. This combined approach to painting is my early attempt at modern literati painting.

Dream of Red Chamber and Its Author

 Yesterday, I played the music Frown in Vain, which was the theme song for Dream of the Red Chamber, on a xiao.

Dream of the Red Chamber is a great novel written by Cao Xueqin during the Qing dynasty. In the 20th century, some scholars argued that the last 40 chapters were written by someone else because the quality was not as good as the first 80 chapters. However, I cannot agree with them.

Just take a look at the title. "Dream of the Red Chamber" is much better than "The Story of a Stone," which was originally used. In addition, the poem at the end of the book matches the one at the start well, indicating that the writer of the ending must be at least as excellent as the writer of the beginning.

The scholars who said the last 40 chapters were written by another author also claimed that this second writer modified the end of the story, which had been set by the first writer. How ridiculous! For a great novel, the writer will not let readers know the ending just by reading the first few chapters, as they will try to attract them to keep reading.

The Beauty of Engineering

Recently, a Chinese mathematician, Hong Wang, was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal. Since then, an article entitled "The Beauty of Mathematics," which is said to have been written by her when she was sixteen, has become popular on the internet. This has driven me to write this article to express the beauty of engineering.

Engineering is how we solve practical problems, and thus engineers have to consider everything for the solution to be applied in the real world. It is strongly influenced by the developments of mathematics and natural science, but it has its own characteristics too. Any breakthrough in natural science can trigger significant changes in engineering, driving engineers to learn for life.  A typical example is that since the invention of optical fibre, theories and techniques in telecommunications engineering have been reshaped. 

Many engineering problems are complicated in scale. Engineers typically have to gain a broad knowledge to understand the whole system and its components. Since a lot of problems require repeatedly solving the same issue, reusability must be considered. In software engineering, this means separating functionalities into different functions, classes, or software components. Reusability is sometimes implemented by allowing configurations on a large component template. For example, C-YAWL, a component that I developed at QUT for the open-source YAWL project, provides a way to create simpler business process models through configurations of a large one.

Different from mathematics, where everything can be rigorously proved, an engineering problem can't be proved thoroughly, even though mathematics is often used as an approach to analyse it. 

Compressive sensing is a topic in signal processing which has strong mathematical foundations. Renowned mathematicians such as Terence Tao have made significant contributions. Theories have been proved that, under some conditions, an algorithm can be used to recover signals in a probability close to one, through random sensing. However, in practice it is still impossible to examine how closely the real signal sources fit the assumptions, while these assumptions will never be fully met. The result will be better if the input signals have characteristics closer to satisfying the conditions.

The approach to an engineering problem is very different from rigorous mathematical proofs. Sometimes we have to observe carefully and even use some imagination. I still remember that in a lecture on electronic circuits, the teacher presented his proof. In one step, the math function looked too complicated. Then he said, "It is impossible to solve this nonlinear function. But let me draw it." 

He then drew a curve on the blackboard, and said, "Just look at the curve of the function. If we only focus on this little region, the curve is smooth and we can approximate this part as a straight line. Thus, we can approximate it as a linear function like this, and then..." 

I am sure this type of approximation would never be allowed in pure maths but it is popular in every domain of engineering.

A engineering solution has to consider human behaviours too. For example, a software engineer has to keep in mind that there is some hacker wanting to break into the system they are developing.

Since not everything can be proved with maths or natural science laws, experimental evaluation is the only way to evaluate the performance of a method in engineering. 

I remember that one day I met a professor who was the director of a research group for speech, audio, image and video technologies. I told him that I had encountered a problem when training the Gaussian Mixture model. 

"The covariance matrix becomes singular after some iterations," I said. “Yes. This is a known issue for GMMs," he said. "Do you have an idea to solve it?"

I then explained what I wanted to do. "Do you think my method will work?" I asked. He smiled and said, "You can try and experiment. If it works, then you know it works. Otherwise, you will know it doesn’t.” 

Personality Of Art

 There are many times that I have seen people commenting on bamboo flute performances, saying things like "the pitch is not accurate." My understanding is that the pitch does not need to be accurate. In a lot of cases, this inaccuracy is intended, depending on the music that one is playing. We have all known that when you press a key on a piano, the pitch is unique. You can adjust the way you press the key to get different sound characteristics, but you can't get another pitch. To some extent, this is the piano's limitation. For bamboo flutes, we can always get a different pitch by adjusting either our embouchure or fingering, so that a special characteristic can be achieved.

Any instrument has its own strengths and weaknesses, and thus we can't use a single standard to rate them. The same applies to any musician or artist.

A few days ago, I told my wife that I would be successful in the arts eventually. My wife asked, "How do you know?" I explained, "Because I have a very special personality, which allows me to see everything with a special viewpoint." I then continued, "For example, if you want to write an article, and your viewpoint fits the majority of people, and your structures and languages fit standard aesthetical criteria—yes, you can get a good mark in exams. But this can't be considered an artwork in literature. A form of art will die once a set of standard criteria has been set."