Starting the lab at Mahidol U

This is my lab first blog before moving to Mahidol University, Thailand. I am starting the lab by the end of 2021. I am thankful that I got the funding from COS and DARPA SCORE which allows me to start the lab and hire people even before I start a position. My interest still continue from my PhD which are applying machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to improve scientific processes. I will also expand my research more into NLP, and applied ML and NLP in biomedical domain. I put my current interests below:

Interests

• Science of Science: one of my core research and interest is to make science and education better. I have collaborated with multiple conferences to implement ML and NLP tools to improve in this space. I co-founded Neuromatch conference and help with Neuromatch Summer School which aim to democratize how scientists get access to conferences and proper computational trainings respectively. Moreover, I collaborate with the National Institute of Health (NIH) aiming to use NLP to better understand the funding process.
• Thai Natural Language Prcessing: In extension to science of science, one of my long interest is to expand my research in Thai Natural Language Processing. Comparing to other languages, we still have lack datasets and resources. Pushing on open source software, models, and datasets will help push Thailand ML communities further. I hope that we should have useful tools that most people can use when they have to analyze and understand Thai text.
• Applied ML and NLP for biomedical use cases: Through my PhDs, I also collaborate with many people at Konrad's lab to apply computational approaches for human movements. I am collaborating with Nidhi Seethapathi, Rachit Saluja, and others quite a bit in this space. There are a lot of opportunities that we can apply ML for movement science which I would like to continue collaborating with experts in this area.

Current projects

• Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Academic Trees (Science of Science)
• Scaling matching algorithms for Neuromatch (Science of Science)
• Credit assignments for reviewer network (Science of Science)
• Automatic exercise feedback (Biomedical)

Thought about starting the lab and collaborations

Thailand has some policy limitations and small funding landscapes. For example, they have a policy to publish more papers before I can hire graduate students. Although, on the bright side, there are a lot of collaboration opportunities. I am grateful that a lot of people already support me moving to Mahidol University. This includes my PhD advisor Konrad Kording, Prof. Yodchanan Wongsawat (Mahidol), Prof. Sarana Nutanong (VISTEC), and Prof. Attapol Rutherford (Chulalongkorn). At least, I can hire students with them before I can receive students myself. I am also grateful that I have a really strong developer team including Tulakan and Kittinan who started a blog with me and now join the lab as developers. They help me a lot in multiple tasks.

Next steps

Next steps for me are probably to start hiring some more students and developers. I hope to train more researchers and developers directly from Thailand who can make impact at large in the future.