AI Residency: How My Previous Work Changed the Way I think about AI and Machine Learning

A Personal Journey: A letter for devoting into the AI Residency

AI-Generated image from TIAMAT

Dear Reader,

I am super interested in the AI residency, not only because everyone is talking about AI recently, but, because it also relates to my previous experiences of working and studying. I have been engaged into Lenovo’s group three different topics of projects. One of the most exciting project I take part in is AI online education platform design systems. During this summer of 2022 as a Strategic UX designer and researcher, I am very honored to donate myself and researched my passionate topic for the education and technology. Although my bachelor’s background is visual design, I tried out many approaches and the strategies in order to contribute for the teams. I take fully advantages of my college’s library and big consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte’s reports of academic research documents and the articles in order to find out the potential markets for AI education related to K12 children’s education in China. After tons of primary research and the quantitive research documents about the technology and AI implemented applications in current Chinese market, I realized that there is a huge market for developing Artificial Intelligent into the onsite classroom infrastructure which combining 3D interactive touch screens with the smart virtual assistant. Since I have been also engaged into another group collaborating with the software and hardware engineers to create the machine learning generated AI systems that create images and art from the verbal and description in natural languages like OpenAI and Dalle-2, I conducted my research presentation to the teams in relates to the topic of the AI online education. After reading the psychology books and learning mental and physical behavior about kids, I realized that the AI art Generated platforms can be the next trend for helping and cultivating children’s interest in art and knowledge gathering.

While I was doing the research about AI generated art and searching for the machine learning related articles, I realized that GAN Model is now a hot topic for the AI scientists and engineers to develop. Throughout September’s article in Chinese academic magazines which talking about the Diffusion Model, I realized there were already many Chinese companies had already invested into developing the Diffusion Model and started to create the AI generated art projects. Because of the algorithms revolution and the new open source code on Github, many tech companies in China have already gathered the angel round. Quantitive changes in AI causes qualitative changes. From July to Now, a great number of AI painting tools have emerged in China in just a few months, such as WeiXinYi, Inception, 6pen,TIAMAT and so on. I always have a positive mindset to embrace the different perspective of ideas. In Lenovo this summer, I have participated into the AI generated art platforms which is called XIAOHUI. It can help the users to generate different design styles of the artworks by just typing a simple descriptive language into the search bar. XIAOHUI was generated by the developing engineers’ team in Lenovo Research Center in Beijing. I collaborated with the software engineers and the machine learning experts with the quantitive data and articles research, and then gathered information for collecting all the potential source code for training the AI system. Although it was not my expertise of writing the code, and designing the UI structure for the systems, I volunteered myself as a idea contributor and the UX researcher for gathering useful information, and helping with my coworkers to get the information they want in a much efficient way.

In addition, from my previous experiences last year in Alibaba Group as a senior UX game designer, I have been realized that the engaging games and the markets for implementing AI generated avatars in the meta world triggers a huge amount of capitals and the people to invest. I was impressed to the game industry’s market during the pandemic, since our team in Alibaba have launched many iOS and Android games on the app store. The future of game industry and the promising AI development could help to build up more realistic and human centered interactive applications which could triggers a next technology prosperity in the era of Web 3.0. Recently, I just made the presentation about my strategic research report analysis for discussing how gamification could become a great implementation for the future online workplace environment. There are many meta office are booming in recent 2 years, from the online office area like gather town, Accenture’s The Nth Floor, and even from my previous working company PwC also catches up the trend and came out a new online office application called AC Campus. In the meta office, the employees we can choose different identities and dress and customize our own avatars. The overall experiences of having the meta office is quite amazing. I am pretty optimistic about the future online working office could have those functions to help employees improves their working enthusiasms and enjoy online working.

Back to the academic interests about AI study, I am super interested into the game and human-centered interactive design part of creating and implementing the AI platforms. I believe I can use my current graduate degree knowledge of strategic thinking and business analysis into helping with the AI industry in the future to solve the problems and donating ideas to help and collaborate with other AI Research Scientists and engineers to discuss, develop and implement the research agenda. I have a strong wish that I could bring different ideas and perspectives from a strategic designer’s perspective and the way how to implementing design thinking with considering both aesthetic and executable approaches to the future AI world which brings a lot of possibilities.

Best Regards,

Fang