Inspired by my visit to California Academy of Science, as well as this video about butterflies going extinct, I would like to build a map based visualization showing the progression of wildlife extinction in the globe. It could be an animation or interactive site. Ideally it can sync with some database to automatically stay up to date with later changes.
I meant to learn about wildlifes and nature walking into the museum/aquarium. But during the 3-hour tour, I was filled with the feeling of depressed. Our first stop was the immersive film about reef.
Embark on a journey into the hidden world of coral reefs in this HD film exploring some of our planet’s most biodiverse—and critically threatened—ecosystems.
It walked me through how reefs protect us from typhoon disasters, how the underwater ecosystems flourish with reefs' presence, and how our daily activities have silently killed these friends in nature.
I felt a great sense of stress, for not knowing these earlier, for making mistakes unconciously, for knowing many other people were like me. At the same time, I started to feel like I find the "meaning" and direction that I like to pursue, with my computer engineering background.
After the visit, I started to pay more attention to information regarding the big problems human race is facing at the moment, and how AI, science and engineering can help with those. I start to not think about my own earnings, achievements daily, but really put myself onto the mission of doing something for the larger society.
At once, what confused me was whether there's still anything to work on in the world at all. Living in North America (Toronto, San Francisco Bay Area), with a decent income, it seemed like I have got all I need. But I still don't feel "happy". I felt angry when I see news about suppressing people of color. I feel confused reading news about political disputes between countries. I feel scared of reckless people owning guns. I feel worried when hearing about global warming and the fact that we are looking for another living world (meaning we are giving up on Earth). I feel helpless and sad when I see people not mentally healthy but still remain inaction: many college students around me suffer from great stress, unhealthy peer pressure, they study for ridiculous reasons but not curiosity or eagerness to know. toxic friendship, romantic relationship, incapability to collaborate and so on.
Until I read an article about "new problems" faced by human being, it suddenly makes sense to me. These are very complicated problems that need multidisplinary collaboration and possibly a huge amount of talents and innovation to tackle. These are the "unsolved" problems we see in everyday life. Not only math professors have the rare "unsolved" problems in hands, we all do.