For the entire period of my PhD, I went back to Singapore trice on sponsored trip – in January of 2005 for the 3rd Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC); for the first 6 months in 2006 for internship in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), during which I visited Taipei for the 4th APBC and visited Institute of Advanced Bioscience at Keio University in Japan; and finally, in October of 2007 to present my paper at the Second Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics (PRIB) workshop.
When I started my PhD, I was very excited about the possibilities of attending conferences overseas. To put very simply, my mantra was “if you want to visit a country, find a conference there.” After almost 2 years away from Singapore, I thought that I should go home for a while and found a suitable conference in Singapore – the 3rd Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC), held at Institute of Infocomm Research. I submitted a poster titled “Mosirium: A Modelling and Simulation Tool for Lactation in the Mouse”, got Dairy CRC to pay for my return air ticket to Singapore and gotten AUD 350 from FH Drummond Fund to cover the conference fees. It was surprisingly easy and I got the hang of asking for money.
Eventually, Mosirium did not make it into my doctoral thesis at all. However, I got many rewards from the conference itself. Firstly, I got to know Prof. Lin Feng, from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, who was working on bioinformatics. This was how I started to think of an internship in BioInformatics Research Centre in NTU when I got back to Melbourne and started my second round of fund hunting. Secondly, I saw one of the posters from Singapore Polytechnic – a FYP project under Cyril Chua – which I had used to start a series of correspondence with my alma mater and that eventuated into my first full-time job.
When I returned to Melbourne after the third APBC, I was searching for funds to attend the 4th APBC, which would be held in Taipei – I had never been there before. It turned out that there are 2 scholarships from the university that can be used. The Melbourne Abroad Travelling Scholarship (MATS) provides up to AUD 1000 for overseas conference travels and visiting a university. Postgraduate Overseas Research Experience Scholarship (PORES) provides up to AUD 5000 to undertake at least a 3-month research attachment in a foreign university. Most importantly, PORES and MATS can be applied simultaneously for the same trip if worked correctly. Thereafter, I decided to try to secure an internship placement with Prof. Lin Feng, which I did, and during that duration, attend the 4th APBC in Taipei and visit Keio University in Japan. In addition, I can apply for FH Drummond Fund again for overseas conference. In total, I secured AUD 6800 (AUD 1000 from MATS, AUD 1300 from FH Drummond Fund, and AUD 4500 from PORES).
With that, I started my 6 months internship under Prof. Lin Feng. Since I was staying at home but the scholarship applications required me to put funding for accomodations, I had sufficient funds to get myself a motorcycle for the internship.
Since Honda NSR SP 150 is no longer in production, I can safely say that this is my last NSR SP. Before I return to Melbourne at the end of my internship, I sold the motorbike to my good old primary school friend, Eric Wong (also known as “Chicken”). For the record, Eric was the one who said that “What are dreams for if they are not made to come true?” Why sell it to Eric? Well, Eric had wanted a NSR SP 150 when he was getting his motorbike licence but I passed my licence before him and bought a NSR SP 150. He ended up buying an Aprilia 125 instead. I do have to thank him for graciously buying this bike from me.
I went to Taipei in late January of 2006 for the 4th Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference and that was the first time I met Prof. Chung I-Fang of National Yang Ming University who is now a tenured professor, and Kuo Cheng-Ju (Zheng Ru), who was I-Fang’s masters student back then. I have a lot to thank both of them for allowing me to use their servers for my computational work.
Zheng Ru is a very interesting guy. He lives right on Yang Ming Shan in a 3-storey house with a swimming pool. No doubt that his family is very rich and it is his own hardwork and determination that is the most admirable. Eventually, we even collaborated on 2 text mining competitions (BioCreative) and published 2 manuscripts in BMC Bioinformatics as a result.
I do have to say that by the time I went to the 4th APBC, my doctoral work had changed directions and cell simulation is no longer in the scope. My purpose to visit the Institute of Advanced Biosciences, Keio University, was for cell simulation. Even though things had changed, I have to fulfil my scholarship requirements. This trip was arranged by Koichi Takahashi, the main developer of E-Cell 3.
I think I was more amazed at Tokyo itself than anything else. The food is marvellous. I had actually seen a chain smoker when I was eating my ramen one day. This old man was sitting outside in the chill of snowy winter and smoked one cigarette after another, using the old cigarette to light the new cigarette. I am dumbstruck.
I am really unsure how to describe Tokyo except “confusing” and “orderly chaos”. I can practically find everything there, no matter how perverse. There is even a shopping centre of pornography of all imaginations, and seriously, some genitals are not even of the same species. The subway system is unimaginable – Shinjuku station has more than 60 different exits. Actually, it was this trip to Tokyo that triggered enough interest to start to learn Japanese but sadly, only enough enthusiasm mustered to start. I will definitely have to visit this place again for all the food and “unique sights”.
My first decent manuscript from my PhD was rejected at this point in time. It was submitted to First International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics (PRIB), to be held in Hong Kong. One of the reviewers rejected my manuscript on basis that “my mathematics symbols do not look nice” and proceeded with a paragraph filled with grammatical errors and awkward sentence structures to describe my poor English writing. There is no word to describe that feeling. Despite so, that anger stayed with me for a long time, which fuelled my determination to start a periodical in Python language and its technology – The Python Papers (ISSN 1834-3147) – together with Tennessee Leeuwenburg as the Editor-in-Chief, while I was an Associate Editor. Tennessee is the founder of Melbourne University Computer Students’ Association (MUCSA) and that led me to realize something – once a creator, always a creator.
The rejected manuscript was revised and accepted by the 2nd PRIB, which was held in Singapore, and that gave me another free air ticket back home again. This time I met Angela Jean who eventually became a collegue at Life Technologies in 2011.