warning: this is a particularly long post. activate your browser’s Reading Mode (if it has one) for a more pleasant time.

opportunity

this summer, I had the pleasure of working at the Electronics & Telecommunications Institute of Korea (ETRI, or 한국전자통신연구원 in Korean), courtesy of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative. working down the hierarchy, we go from ETRI to the Software Contents Research Laboratory, from there to the Intelligent Robotics Research Division, from there to the Human-Machine Interaction Research Group, and from there to my desk. at the head of the HMI Research Group is 박재홍, and my mentor for the summer was 윤영우. there really should be honorifics, but for the sake of blogging, let’s just consider names as names.

project

as part of the HMI Research Group (which I will defer to HMIRG henceforth), my responsibility as an intern was to investigate sentiment analysis and natural behavior in physical robotics. I was given the NAO robot to work with. the current state of robotics movement leaves much to be desired—we don’t have many robots that can actually generate realistic gestures in realtime as they speak. instead, what many manufacturers opt for are predefined gestures replicated from short video clips—in NAO’s case, coded by hand in XML format. these gestures are rather repetitive and predictable. do humans move their head with identical spatial, temporal parameters every time they express agreement to something? didn’t think so! by using machine learning, statistics (which itself is a crucial part of ML), and natural language processing, we can train robots to better respond in an organic way during real interactions with real people.

having come in with zero NLP/ML experience, I found myself daunted during the initial stages. I quickly caught up on theory, thanks to MIT’s 6.036 Spring 2015 notes, acquainting myself with the ML library sklearn and the NLP libraries spaCy and nltk. I learned quite a lot, and though there were some dull moments during the project that involved tedious tasks like collecting robot sensor data, I loved doing what I did.

language barrier: the greatest challenge

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the biggest problem living and working in Korea was the language barrier. despite having studied Korean for two years at MIT, I found myself lost the moment I set foot in Korea. four semesters—not quite enough. I now realize that I haven’t even crossed the barrier between beginning and comfortable yet. a big help was that fact that the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese languages are heavily Sinicized (influenced by Chinese culture). over 60% of these languages are derived from Chinese characters; in my case, Vietnamese derives from Hán tự, while Korean derives from 한자. so many words are the same, with only minute differences in pronunciation. this made a lot of new vocabulary words pretty trivial and engrained the moment I saw them.

bottom line: I was required to adapt. I chose Daejeon over Seoul for complete immersion. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I saw foreigners in Daejeon during my almost-3-month stay. signs in Korean were everywhere, and my ears were, at any given moment, ready to burst from the amount of information cramming itself into their canals. it speaks volumes that my reading speed is at least three times as fast as it was before I arrived (and that’s after two years of studying the language formally). I can now think of what to say next as my brain quickly processes Korean grammar rules and strings together phrases accordingly.

you can expose yourself to any language for years and years through formal courses and television, but your rate of growth is that much more pronounced when you’re actually in an environment that allows breathing room for only that language. for those of you looking to come to South Korea, do yourself a favor and don’t rely on your English to get you around. :)

work culture in a foreign country

because I was at a research institute, I can’t say for certain that my experience accurately describes that of those in industry. for the most part, it’s pretty similar to the US, with a few differences. first, you’re expected to come in at 9:00, leaving at 18:00 with an hour-long lunch break. Koreans are very punctual and work-oriented: one of the senior researchers in my lab lives about a $25 taxi ride away, yet was always at his desk by around 8:30. as far as I know, most people in the Bay Area working at software companies are free to come around 10-11 and leave pretty early in the afternoon, granted their work is solid. definitely a difference. second, greetings and etiquette are emphasized more heavily in Korea. once, one of the project leaders scolded me for not saying hello to every member of the lab when I came in. it was terrifying.

we also practiced the standard Korean tradition of 회식 (hweh-shik), which involves nights of debauchery with dozens of beer bottles and comfortable conversation in the company of one’s colleagues. I’m a very good drinker, so this was no problem, and more importantly, these nights reminded me a lot of good times back in Cambridge with my friends. Korea being a workaholic country is no joke, but it’s traditions like these that, understandably, sway your heart.

had I stayed in the US for an internship, I wouldn’t have grown so much. all summer, work felt secondary next to the cultural nuances, the unpredictable weather that is the annual 장마, the language exchanges during which I spoke in broken Korean and the other interns replied in broken English.

also, did I mention that I was the youngest in the lab by at least four years to everyone else? I was the literal baby.

what I learned about myself

this was the first summer of my life away from the comfort of family. I’d never known anything else. I had a roommate, of course, but given that he came home at 9PM every day and left for Seoul every weekend, I have to say that I was honorarily alone.

what I learned? being alone isn’t bad at all, and it’s an almost necessary condition for introspection and appreciation of the world. note the difference between being alone and feeling lonely. family and friends were always a Facetime call, a Facebook message, an Instagram comment away, but the physical loneliness urged me to venture out of my comfort zone. honestly, my time in Korea brought to me a surge of emotions I hadn’t felt ever since I first came to MIT. at that time, too, I left behind the comfort of friends and family. two years later, I’ve fully adapted to Massachusetts and its winters, its atmosphere. no doubt I’d adjust similarly if I stayed in Korea for longer than three months.

from here on, I’m going to respect my personal time. I’m going to seek out more and more opportunities to be away from the bustle of the city, to sit and think about my life, to give thanks for the blessings I’ve received which so many others so desperately desire.

a note: future interns

for those looking for a MISTI experience in Korea, I have a few tips.

• do not slack off in Korean class. every vocabulary word and every grammatical structure needs to be a part of you. live and breathe the language. pay attention to every phrase/sentence you hear in your songs and dramas. conversational Korean, to be sure, is very different from formally taught Korean, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to slack off.
• if your living accommodations aren’t furnished, prepare to make a trip to Daiso for cheap supplies. go to e-mart for a cheap, no-brand office chair (I got mine for 44,000₩).
• buy bug spray and sunscreen. the humidity and heat were almost enough to kill me most days. it gets a bit better on rainy days, but for the most part, expect to be hot.
• read up on Korean public transportation and how it works ahead of time. I learned more than a week in, and it didn’t help that I was late. when you return to the States, you’ll probably miss Korean public transportation for the rest of your life. I sure do.
• Seoul is not the only city in which one can have fun. explore the nooks and crannies of your assigned city. breathe in the fresh air. go for a hike. walk the markets. take the bus at night in silence.
• don’t be shy! modern-generation Koreans love to interact with foreigners and gain perspective for themselves. arguably, my best friends this summer were the three other interns (all natives) in my lab.

I’m sure there are more, but they slip my mind.

unforgettable

I’ll never forget the Buddhist temple retreat. it wasn’t so much the activities, but the exposure to nature that made me happy and at peace with myself. reuniting with the other interns and Matt Burt and Professor Jeong were amongst the highlights of the summer, to be honest, and I loved the hike we did together.

that’s one for the books.

until next time, Korea.