Home

From Engineering to Creativity and Consciousness - What am I Doing With My Life?

I'm often asked how someone who studied electrical engineering ended up researching and teaching creativity and consciousness. Looking back, it does seem like a circuitous route, but indeed, there was a natural progression (or at least I’d like to think so) that I am happy to recount here. 

In my junior college days at Santa Monica College, I had a friend who left me his record collection (records were vinyl back then). The collection included bands like Wire, XTC, Wall of Voodoo, the Residents as well as music from Jean Michael Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schultz, Philip Glass, and Synergy. It was my first introduction to electronic music and triggered my passion for music. 

While I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying electrical engineering and computer science in the 80’s, I bought a synthesizer (Prophet 600) and a four track and started writing songs for fun. I took the electronic music class (Berkeley had an early Synclavier in their music department) taught by Edwin Dugger and jammed with friends. Berkeley was a great place to see live music, theater, and dance especially with student rush tickets (only $4.00 USD) at Zellerbach Hall. 

In the mid-1980’s, I took the opportunity to do a Co-op (6 month full-time internship) at Belcore in New Jersey. The coop experience (I can still remember being interviewed in San Francisco by Bob Cordell whose group I worked in) marked a transition moment in my life. It was during that period I decided to switch emphasis from Computer Architecture to design automation and VLSI CAD. It was also during this period that I developed an interest in musical theater (visiting New York and Broadway during the weekends) and Bruce Springsteen’s music (New Jersey in the 80’s). I had the fortune of working under Dave Boyer on developing their Mulga IC design tools. Dave was also into playing music (he also taught me how to wind-surf). Fun as it was at the time, it was living alone in New Jersey and working at Belcore that made me realize that life as an engineer probably wasn’t for me. 

When I got back to Berkeley I was able to get a research assistant position in Al Despain’s group developing on CAD tools working with Bill Bush and Rick McGeer. Upon completing my undergraduate degree, I was also able to get into the graduate program at Berkeley with Al Despain's support. If you are not into money, the life of a graduate student is as good as it gets. Although there are stressful moments (e.g., prelim and qualifying exams), by and large graduate school is great environment to exploring life. The University had a policy of sending students to make presentations at conferences that accepted their work. I was able to visit a lot of places and make many international friends, culminating in a four month round-the-world tour in 1989 which opened my eyes to a lot of different cultures and strengthened my relationship with fate and the unknown. 

The round the world tour, coupled with my researching formal methods and the syntax and semantics of representational languages (I was working on developing a representation for manufacturing processes suitable for VLSI design) led me to my first forays into the field of consciousness. Having many adventures (I only brought 1500 dollars with me and no credit card) and seeing many different cultures in such a short period of time reinforced my view that people are inherently good. I became interested in exploring communication, how and why we can understand each other. Specifically, what is the inherent "common semantic base" that enables us to communicate with one another? For example, when I say “red,” how can I be sure that you know what I mean with absolute certainty (there is a reason that they call it a Doctorate of Philosophy)? What about communicating inner experience?

Although I would have loved to stay in graduate school indefinitely (and some argue that I dress as if I have), there comes a time in which one has to graduate. My advisor took a position at the University of Southern California (I was his last student at Berkeley) and I went down to Los Angeles with him to complete my thesis. While at USC, I became involved with East West Players, the Asian American theater there, and Visual Communications (VC) the non-profit media organization that organizes the Asian American Film Festival in Los Angeles. I also became good friends with Linda Mabolot who was the director of VC who sadly passed away a few years ago. With my interest in music and electronic sound, I became involved in sound design for theater at East West Players and also recorded a single tape about the “Asian American Experience” titled People of Color (which is available in MP3 on this website). While at USC I also sat in on several classes including song-writing and film adaptation. The adaptation class taught by Nelson Gidding brought in many speakers from industry including Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) and Robert Wise (who was the editor for Citizen Kane – my youngest son is named Orson). 

The meeting with Michael Crichton was another pivotal moment for me as I had previously read his book titled “Travels” in which he talks about his life as a medical student at Harvard and travel experiences in which he explores his views and reality in a light-hearted way. It was a time that I had just returned from a trip to Central America and, with my PhD thesis nearly complete, was deciding on my career path. 

During my round-the-world tour, I had ended up in Egypt and became fascinated with the pyramids there. When I returned and found out that there were pyramids in Central America, I decided I had to visit them. Sitting on top of a pyramid looking down upon the tropical rain forest (there are some great shots here), one begins to philosophize about one’s life. Traveling across the country of Guatemala, sitting atop an ancient Mayan pyramid, I began to wonder “how many people here know how to design a microprocessor?” Expanding this notion out to the whole of humanity made me realize how incredibly fortunate I was, and also the responsibility that has been bestowed upon me by the opportunity. Society has created universities (of which Berkeley is considered by many to be one of the best). Each year, only a few students gain entry into the engineering program and have the stamina to complete, and I am soon to be one of them. I felt a tremendous amount of gratitude to have been given the opportunity to study at Berkeley and felt a deep responsibility to do something worthy of the investment that society has made in me. 

My dilemma was that the traditional scientific pursuit no longer thrilled me (the subject of another article). During my time in Los Angeles at USC I had also attended the David Henry Hwang writer’s workshop at East West Players and wrote a musical which was read at the Powerhouse Theater in Venice. Jeff Liu who also sings on the People of Color tape (I went by the name “Here and Now” which was the name of his theater ensemble at the time), directed it using much of the cast of a production of Into the Woods running at East West Players at the time. For me, seeing the response from the audience was a very satisfying experience. I remember watching one of my friends who came to the reading, Deb Halberstadt, in tears during an emotional scene. The experience gave me a first-had experience of the creative process and of being able to establish a deep connection to another person through media. 

In contrast, giving technical talks at conferences there may be a thousand or so people at the conference of the nearly seven billion people in the world. Of those thousand, there may be a few hundred at the session in which your paper is presented. Of those few hundred, there may be a dozen or so that really care about what you’ve done. Media, however, be it music, theater, or video is more accessible with the potential of influencing anyone off the street. Media is also a lot more fun to create and advancements in digital technology are making it easier and easier for individuals to express themselves and share their creations. There was a good Asian American community doing a lot of fun work. I was living in a warehouse where I had a small recording studio and a Video Toaster (early computer system for video editing) and hosted a lot of parties there. Kip Fulbeck, a friend and video artist, edited some of his early works there (http://www.seaweedproductions.com/).

So the dilemma I faced was that I enjoyed being creating and supporting the creation of media, but felt a tremendous responsibility to apply the knowledge and skills that I had acquired over the past twelve years (undergrad and graduate) of formal education. In my class with Michael Crichton, I asked him about his experience walking away from a Harvard MD and career in medicine to become a writer. His answer I recall followed along the lines of the Joseph Campbell “follow your bliss," but also added that his medical background gives his writing greater realism (and this was before ER). A few months after the discussion with him, I bumped into him at the DMV in Santa Monica and was able to thank him for his advice. 

My area of research, VLSI CAD, centered around developing and applying algorithms to automate the process of designing integrated circuits. With a “silicon compiler,” chip designers describe the high-level functionality of the chip that they would like to design which is iteratively refined (by applying domain specific knowledge at each of the stages) and “compiled” into two dimensional “mask layout” from which an integrated circuit is manufactured. There are a variety of tools which are used to synthesize, extract, verify, and optimize designs during the different stages of the design process. Each tool is a complex system that collectively is organized within a framework to work together with other tools. 

While I was finishing up my thesis, I wrote a proposal titled “CAD for Film” that combined my knowledge of engineering and automated design with my interest in media. The idea was to apply CAD techniques to the development of media projects. Like IC design, film projects were initially developed by a few people, required knowledge from a wide variety of domains, design decisions were very interdependent (change one thing, and it affects a lot of other things), and expensive to produce. In IC design, we have software frameworks, design and knowledge representation, verification and optimization tools, etc. In film production, the development tools were pretty much just a word processor and a spreadsheet. The proposal offered an approach that applied design automation methodologies to film production. How should the information be represented for characters, locations, props, costumes, etc.? This was just before the Internet became popular in the mainstream (though as University students, we had been using the Internet for quite some time already). Several of the problems such as resource allocation and scheduling faced in breaking down a script could easily be solved using the graph-based algorithms already used in CAD. 

USC has arguably one of the best film schools in the world and at the time also had a top twenty engineering program and was the right place for me to be at the time. As I showed my proposal around, it turned out that there was a project in the School of Cinema Television involving Richard Weinberg and David Belson that was mapping out the production process for film. The Engineering School and School of Cinema Television were also looking for greater collaboration and I also became involved in the project. Although Universities are considered bastions of free thought and research, there is reality of finding sources of funding to finance the work. 

Given my background and interests, I was hired by Max Nikias, who was Associate Dean of the Engineering School at the time, to work with him in developing a proposal for the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center Program (ERC). At USC, I established a multimedia laboratory which had a great vibe at the cusp of the Internet boom, and helped develop a Masters Program to retrain dislocated aerospace workers for jobs in the multimedia and entertainment industry (the program was developed in conjunction with the Los Angeles Regional Technology Alliance). I really enjoyed working with the students (many of which went on to start their own companies) and the constant exposure to new things. I also enjoyed learning from many of the faculty at USC.

Developing the ERC proposal exposed me to some of the realities of academic life at a top-tier University including the pressures, politics, personalities, and efforts involved in fund-raising. I remember a day in which I had to get up in the morning, fly to Silicon Valley to give a talk at Fuji-Xerox to give a talk, and fly back to deliver a class lecture in the evening. It was in delivering a talk on behalf of Max after we won the ERC award that established the Integrated Media Systems Center, that I met Lily Chiang who was a distinguished alumnus visiting to learn about the new initiatives at the University. After meeting Lily who was from Hong Kong, and giving her a tour of my lab, I had a strange sense that I would see her again. She would later become my wife (the subject of another song).

I moved to Hong Kong in the mid-ninety’s, initially as a visiting Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). An office-mate of mine from USC, Tsui Chi-Ying, taught there and was able to get me a position. Hong Kong is considered by many to be the “Hollywood of Asia” and the University was located right next door to the Shaw Brothers Studio. However, the production processes in Hong Kong (and the size of the production budgets) were very different from those of Hollywood which made visual effects and pre-production difficult. HKUST was also focused more upon engineering research than applications. After researching opportunities for Hong Kong in digital entertainment, my wife and I wrote a position paper for the Government (also linked to this site). 

In the late 90’s, I was given the opportunity to establish a media program at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (which was more applied in nature) completely from scratch. The resulting Multimedia Innovation Centre (MIC) brings together technology and content expertise from both industry and academic backgrounds. Although there were only 2-3 developers in Hong Kong at the time, video games became a strategic area of focus. Video games apply the latest technologies (research opportunities) to create new interactive experiences (more research opportunities) that also have tremendous commercial potential. Its low barrier-to-entry also made it very attractive. In game production requires the creation of 3D virtual worlds and animated movements which are very labor intensive. Again, it seems like design automation can help facilitate the development process. I also grew up playing games from chess and go as a kid with my father, to strategic simulations by Avalon Hill and SPI and role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons in school.

During the early 2000’s, my wife and I had three children (so far). I found that having kids changes one’s perspective of the world. The world has been changing as well, with increasing concern for the environment, terrorism, widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots,” and the threat of new diseases. On the positive side, we have the rise of broadband Internet and the opportunities that become possible. The life as an academic offers one a lot of time to think, ponder, and reflect. With children comes an increased interest in creating a better environment than the one that I myself was born into. While I was at Berkeley and during the heyday of artificial intelligence and neural networks, I recalled reading an article that estimated that it would take in integrated circuit the size of a football field to simulate the neurons in a human brain. Many were hypothesizing how long it would take until Moore’s Law (exponential growth in the performance of integrated circuits) caught up and would make that level of computation possible. Fifty years? A hundred? For me, the answer seemed obvious. From a hardware perspective, it is possible today. It takes two people, a male and a female, about nine months to produce the hardware. The challenge is in programming the thing.

What you see and hear affect how you feel and think. How you feel and think affect how you experience the world. Video games and the Internet represent an exciting new mass-media which I believe have the potential to change the world in very profound ways. Up until very recently, what most people see and hear (e.g., on TV, movies, etc.) are controlled by those that have the resources to produce and distribute. With broadband Internet, anyone can create and share. The blogging phenomenon, podcasts, and file sharing are just the beginning. Furthermore, the interactive nature of video games (and associated physiological responses) enables experiences to become personalized. Previous media took a buckshot “one-size-fits-all” approach.

A few years ago, I became increasingly concerned with the dark and violent nature of the content that the students in our Masters program were producing. We had three student film projects, two of which were about triad drug deals, and the third was a love-story gone bad turned suicide. Technically they were shot and edited very well and a case could be made that there were positive morals to the stories. However, it seemed to me that the students were creating more of what is in the mainstream media today. While, like most other programs around the world, we focused on the technology and production aspects of media. The “content” and “social impact of media” aspects were not directly addressed. 

I decided to get back into teaching (I had left teaching for a few years to focus on building MIC). My target was a compulsory subject titled Recovering Creativity taught at the time by Roy Horan, a colleague I recruited into the department who developed the original course around mind mapping, lateral thinking, and traditional creativity exercises. I spent a summer researching the topic and redeveloping the course with Roy, inspired by articles such as “Education and the Significance of Life” by J. Krishnamurti (and now passed out during the first lecture every year). I also attended a workshop that my sister introduced and taught by Michael Mamas which provided a mind-body perspective and led to further reading on psychology (e.g., bioenergetics, etc.). The course was expanded to include other perspective on creativity including views such as Osho (who has a book on the subject), Stephen Nachmanovich (who has a book titled Free Play), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow), Daniel Goleman (emotional intelligence) and also Viola Spolin (improvisation). An outline for the original form of this class and its rationale is available on this site. I enjoy teaching this course and continue to both learn from it and refine it each time that it is offered.

Exploring one’s creativity from an expanded perspective (creation as a reflection of self) naturally leads one towards an inquiry into the nature of consciousness. How does one experience things and how do these experiences motivate action and creation (or impede it)? Going deeper, this question beacons to the ultimate question that everyone addresses in one way or another of who am I and how am I here (the why question is left for to the theologians)? Consciousness is an interesting field of study today because it brings together science and philosophy in a very direct way. While the rational approach of modern science is coming up with some interesting perspectives on how we feel and think, an all explanations tend to bump into the “hard problem of consciousness” (as coined by David Chalmers) of explaining the phenomenon of direct experience and “inner life”? 

Art, stories, and media have been an effective method for representing and sharing experience. Through empathy and imagination, communication and relationship happens. Since the beginning of mankind, the fabric of our diverse cultures has been forged by stories. Writers such as Karen Armstrong and Joseph Campbell have written many books on the influence of story and myth on society. Nigel Spivey also has a great DVD series titled “How Art Made the World” which also describes art’s influences on society. Western science and philosophy are an ongoing story originating from the days of the Phusikoi in the 6th century BC. People today have in a sense been “programmed” by these stories.

The focus of my work today addresses the following question: Is it possible to create experiences that raise the awareness and consciousness of the audience? The objective, of course, is to work towards achieving what every beauty pageant contestant answers if given one wish: “World Peace.” This has nothing to do with government leaders, but more to do with each individual on the planet, starting (for me) with myself, to find the peace within. It is a direct inquiry to understand the source of my actions, particularly those that result in actions driven by destructive emotions. The Internet today provides a world-wide distribution platform. Interactive media and video games create compelling experiences that are also personalized. If we can create experiences that raise consciousness and represent these experiences in digital form (images, audio, video, interactive), perhaps we can achieve world peace in our time. Is there any other way?