Animated Film: The Blending of Art with Science (By Gene S. Lee)

In this post I will review about a seminar I attended last this week. Yep, I still have many things to write from my previous blog post series. However, this issue is still fresh in my mind and to prevent the possibility that it may evaporate from my memories quickly, I will review this issue first instead and postpone the previous blog post series.

So, in the beginning of previous week I read a seminar notice posted in KAIST Portal. This portal is basically an internal web that provides information to KAIST student and staff. Coincidentally, I checked the notice in seminar tab which in the top of it I saw a seminar organized by KAIST Graduate School of Culture Technology. I carefully read the notice and what made me surprise was the speaker of the seminar. The seminar would be presented by Gene S. Lee, Ph.D. according to that notice.

Who is he? Why it surprised me? What made me wanted to attend this seminar at first place?

It all because I saw where he came from. He is currently a Senior Software Engineer for Walt Disney Animation Studios. That's why dude. Because he is from DISNEY.

Walt Disney Animation Studio's Logo

Who doesn't know Disney? Disney, founded by Walt Disney is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise (as stated in the company overview in its company website). Since its foundation in 1923 Disney has always been creatively finding its way in the show business and living the children dream. As an important division of the whole Disney company, the Walt Disney Animation Studios since 1937 have been producing more than 50 animation motion pictures which have been proved not only profitable, but also featured high quality story indicated by many awards won by the movies, including the most prestigious one the Academy Awards. List of animated movie produced by Disney since 1937 can be viewed here or in the short video below which was released on the celebration of Disney 50th Animated movie, Tangled (this video however hasn't include the most recent movies, Winnie The Pooh and Wreck-It Ralph). Because of these many years of experiences, the Disney's products are well known across the generations. I believe in their childhood our grandparents also watched Disney's movies. The key of success of Disney animated movie is not only limited to the rich story that can be enjoyed by all people, but also the basic principle of Disney that always improve their movie production, so every new movie will have better (graphical) quality than the previous one. This principle was later explained more in the seminar. The merger of Pixar into Disney in 2004, undoubtedly makes The Walt Disney Studio to be a giant in the field of animated movies.

50th Celebration Trailer of Walt Disney Animation Studios Movies (2010)

So, come back to the seminar. I was the first person to enter the seminar room last week. I saw the speaker's MacBook already set and the title slide of his presentation featuring various characters from Disney's animated movie appeared on the screen. I took a bold chance to capture the title's slide. Later, in the beginning of the seminar the speaker kindly asked the audience not to capture or record his talk due to the copyright matter and also one of the content of his presentation (Frozen) is still confidential because the movie hasn't been released yet. This was a lucky chance for us to learn about that new movie, so to pay some respect to his wish I decided to move away my iPhone and just listened to his talk carefully. So, the content that I used here, i.e. photos, videos, were obtained by employing the almighty Google search. Later during the presentation I learned that his presentation was actually prepared for a conference in Korea namely BIEN 2013, as he was invited to be one of the plenary speaker. You can view the official summary of his talk here.

Gene S. Lee

He opened the seminar by introducing us to Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS). Located in Burbank, the same location with the Walt Disney Company headquarters, WDAS employs around 850 people. Why so many people? Because the task of making an animated movie is not simple. It takes around 300 people for one movie for the course of 2-3 years. After that he talked about animated movie production in general. How he collaborated with a lot of people with different expertise, i.e. artists, software engineers, computer engineers, etc. He also mentioned that, the key to Disney Animated Movie's success is not only the strong background story created for the particular movie, but also the capability of the company to consistently improve the quality, mostly graphical, of the new movie by employing the latest technology, including both software and hardware breakthrough. One sad things is the hardware of previous movie production will no longer be able to use since for new production the "big boss" often demands better result and faster production time for the next product, so they need to renew the resources. On the other side, the requirement of latest software is not always come with cheap price. The community for this animation movie making is not so large, most of the time they are forced to create their own software to be able to fulfill their movie targets. After learning all this thing in introduction, I have no doubt why a MIT graduate like Gene S. Lee is interested to work for Disney. It is all because the challenges faced in making a such beautiful Disney animated movie is not that easy to be solved, and it will definitely intrigue the bright minds to come and participate. In addition, he also mentioned that the company regularly conducts a global talent search to recruit the whether employ or intern from all around the world. They are willing to bring in a promising candidate to work with the other employees in the headquarter. Some of the talents are including the expert of Finite Element Method (FEM), Machine Learning, etc. At first I confused what are these people do with making an animated movie? I always thought they mainly hire graphical designer, animator, etc. But later, after he explained about the specific requirements of his three latest production (Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph & Frozen), I began to realize the importance of these experts.

WDAS Employees

Three movies discussed during the seminar. From left to right: Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen.

He began to discuss about the challenges and breakthrough in Tangled. This movie's main character is Rapunzel, whose hair is 70 feet long. The first challenge was of course the long hair. They struggled to simulate Rapunzel's long hair. The simulation here means the dynamic of the hair while the character is moving. This is where the FEM takes places. Yep... They simulated the hair by using FEM. How incredible it was. I couldn't show the detail of the simulation, because I didn't record or take picture during the seminar, but I found some papers, yep they published a paper related to this movie, which discussed the hair simulation and how they control it. This hair challenges however seems to be unrealistic in the physical world, because in the real physical world imagine how much the weight of 70 feet long hair? It will make the character almost impossible to move around. But since this is movie is a story about the girl with 70 feet hair, they have to find solution for that. They improvised by creating creative physics tool, which allowed their artists (animator) to control the hair while the character is moving. I saw the original motion of the Rapunzel, and I was amazed by the role of FEM to solve the dynamic motion of the hair. He added that the blonde color of the hair was also difficult, since the blonde color behavior is strongly related with the light that struck onto it. This hair's color related problem and the light illumination of the hair (sometimes the artists want to make Rapunzel's hair to glow) were further explained in this paper. The next challenge was related to the light tracing and designing the background inside the movie to make the animated movie a little bit more realistic. Why they focused so much into the detail? As explained by the speaker, the audience will not notice any defect if they make the movie as detail and as realistic as possible. In contrast, when you make the movie without paying attention to the detail, the audiences will easily notice and complain about the quality of the movie. Yep, that's a lot of hard work to satisfy the consumer taste. The last challenge in this movie was the dynamic of multilayer cloth worn by Rapunzel. Luckily, in this movie only Rapunzel that used multilayer cloth, the other supporting characters only used single layer cloth.

Finished with the Tangled, the speaker explained about the challenges faced during the production of Wreck-It Ralph. The first one was many characters generation. This is the only Disney animated movie to have the most number of characters in one movie. The movie's story was about the adventure of a video game character into the realm of the other video game. That's why they need to generate a lot of characters. To create a character together with their (facial) expression was also a serious challenge. To overcome this problem they made their own programming language namely as dRig. This program also known as an artist-friendly object oriented programing, which allowed the artist to easily create the characters for the movie. As I also remembered, the second challenge was related to controlling the characters created. This is where the machine learning takes place. By employing machine learning, they wouldn't have difficulty even they had so many characters during production.

The last one, the speaker talked about the most recent project soon to be released during Thanksgiving holiday. This movie called Frozen used the most sophisticated technology applied in animated movie production and became the most graphically beautiful movie ever created so far by Disney. He discussed three challenges of these movies, the first one was visual effects. These movies included many visual effects since the theme of the movie is related to magic and sorcery. I'm not really understand how they solved the visual effect problem, since it was not conceptually explained as previous movie, but rather technologically approach was discussed. The second challenge was the multilayer cloth. Unlike Tangled, in this movie this problem was way much complicated since the background story told all of characters to live in freezing environment, then all characters must be equipped with multilayer cloth. The last challenge was snow behavior. He explained how they simulated the snow so the environment would seemed to be realistic. They also specifically invited the snow expert to give lectures about snow to the artist, software engineer and some other staffs participated in this movie. As one of the results they simulated the behavior of four types of snows (I didn't really recall all the types). He said, if you see the movie later, you will have the feeling that the character of the movie will experience real snow.

Souvenir from the seminar

Before closing the seminar the speaker distributed us a sticker of his company as you can see above. He claimed that we couldn't find this sticker sold elsewhere, since it was exclusively distributed by the company only on special occasions. Finally, the seminar was officially closed by watching a teaser trailer of Frozen as you can view in the following video.

 

Disney's Frozen Teaser Trailer

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My life in KAIST on the 2nd week of May 2013 - Part 2 (6th TEDxKAIST B-C-D)

Now come to the second part of my story on the 2nd week of May 2013.

The Introduction

In this post I will briefly explain about 6th TEDxKAIST event held in my campus on May 11th 2013. As you learned in my previous blogpost, TEDxKAIST is an independent local event held with the spirit of TED: ideas worth spreading. The event I attended was the 6th event of TEDxKAIST since its first installment in 2010. This event was actually my second TEDxKAIST event, but this was the first time I officially registered as participant in TEDxKAIST event. In my previous TEDxKAIST event, I was been a substitute of my lab mates who registered but couldn't attended the event. Even though I didn't attend all talks in 5th TEDxKAIST event, I was amazed by the remaining talks. After participating in that event, I later decided not to miss the registration of next TEDxKAIST event again.

The Theme

Early promotional poster of 6th TEDxKAIST event

That's why when I first saw the announcement of the 6th TEDxKAIST event, I prepared myself to be aware of the registration date. As you can see in the early promotional poster, even though the list of speakers hadn't confirmed yet at that time, the theme of 6th TEDxKAIST event itself was already eye-catching. In their homepage about this 6th event, they posted a quote by Jean Paul Sartre who stated that

"Life is Choice between Birth and Death: B-C-D"

When I first saw this quote it really struck my mind. For me this quote is not only inspiring, blowing my mind, but also opening my mind to face the reality that I fully responsible of my life by all the Choices those I made or will make. I committed myself to attend this event, so at first day of registration I registered at TEDxKAIST homepage and was later notified to be one of 100 lucky participants of the 6th TEDxKAIST event.

The Souvenirs

Souvenirs from 6th TEDxKAIST event. From left to right: Lock&Lock's Balance Tumbler, Pen and Notebook, Smart Phone's Screen Cleaner, Small notes with T-Shirt shape, TEDxKAIST Sticker.

Finally, at the day of the event I went to the designated place and I registered myself before the event started and got this souvenir package. To be honest when first time I received the souvenir bag I was a little bit disappointed because they didn't give the TEDxKAIST's hoodie as they did in 5th TEDxKAIST event. But anyway when I checked the souvenir one by one, I found that they gave me a Lock&Lock's Balance Tumbler with infuser, so I can put tea leaves, brewing them, and take it wherever I go. These souvenirs itself exceeded the amount of registration fee (KRW 20,000), so finally I took them happily (later I heard that hoodie is only distributed as souvenir on the Fall semester TEDxKAIST event)

The Organizer Team

The organizer of TEDxKAIST event are a professional team. The way they handled the event from the preparation, announcement, till the day of the event manifested their professionalism. The event was started at 2 pm sharp, and they didn't tolerate any late participants (the room was closed when the event started and one of organizers guarded the door). In my opinion this policy is made to help the speaker to focus on their talk without any disruption from late participant who entering the room while talk is being delivered. Since this TEDxKAIST event is located in Korea, the main language of the event is Korean. Luckily, since TED event is a internationally-renowned event, there is a real-time interpreter to translate the Korean talk into English. If you're not familiar with Korean, you should ask the organizer while you're registering to give you a headphone. Later during the talk, the interpreter who stays at a special booth inside the room will translate the talk and deliver it to you via those headphones.

The Talks

This 6th TEDxKAIST event was divided into 4 main sections. The first section consisted of two talks from local speakers and one TED talk from TED.com. The first section as designed by the organizer focused on the impact of individual's choices on the individual and/or the environment around the individual. The first two speakers were Sonya S. Kwak (곽소나) & Myeong Seok Oh (오명석). Their complete background can be learned from this link (click the Speakers - Kor/Eng tab to view their background detail). The talk then followed by a TED Talk video of Sheena Iyengar presented in TEDGlobal 2010. The event was then continued by the second session which was a coffee break and an ideation session. After discussion in the ideation session the talks were resumed. In this third session the talk was started by a TED Talk video of Dan Gilbert followed by two talks by Jeong Weon Lee (이정원) & SooA Yeo (여수아). This third section focused on the decisions for the group by the individual and the choice we make for all. The fourth or last session was an after party with dinner provided and interaction with the all speakers were possible. 

Here I summarized the 6th TEDxKAIST event solely based on my own experience and memory, with some additional features from a related KAIST Herald article. Hope you enjoy it

The 1st Section

The 1st Speaker - Sonya S. Kwak

Sonya S. Kwak, the 1st speaker in 6th TEDxKAIST event

Sonya S. Kwak is currently a Professor of Industrial Design in Ewha Womans University. She is an alumni of KAIST, Dept. of Industrial Design. She works on the research project related to Human Robot Interaction (HRI). Her talk entitled "The People I Met, The Robot We Made" basically shared her own experience of how she made her robots. She told how the interaction with the people she met led her to decide her robot's design and function. As I quoted from the KAIST Herald article (Vol. 122, Page 4, May 2013) her robots made her famous, won several trophies and exposed to media several times. She introduced us to several robots she created. The first one was "Mung", an Emotional Interaction Robot. This robot can express its emotional feeling by created some "bruising" marks on its face. These bruising marks are made by using LED. Initially this robot was conceived to be a substitute to "swear jar" and applied to young age children to teach them the bad influence of profanity.  For the example, when someone says bad words to the robot, the bruising will comes out indicating that it is hurt. Otherwise, when someone says good word to the robot, the bruising will goes away. This robot is also able to be re-programmed to be "referee" during sport games. As shown in the its World Cup 2010 promotional video, it could detect foul or injury by its bruising.

Mung, Emotional Interaction Robot on World Cup 2010 promotional video

Hangulbot performance

The last robot that she introduced, and also the robot I remembered the most was the "Hangulbot". This robot was inspired while she saw her daughter played Lego. She realized that the shape of Lego could resembles the Hangeul (Korean alphabet) character as the building block. So then she decided to make the Hangulbot, for specific motivation to teach her daughter the Korean alphabet while her daughter is playing (some kind of Edutainment) and to widespread the Hangeul internationally. The basic building block of Hangulbot consisted of five blocks and it can pronounce over 10000 Korean syllables. You can see the Hangulbot's demonstration in the video above. If you want to learn more about Sonya S. Kwak you can watch the following video. She also showed us some funny entertainment video that she directed using the Keepon robot on her previous collaboration work, featuring Korean music group, Peppertones. Enjoy the video.

Interview with Sonya S. Kwak in ArirangTV - The INNERview

Keepon performance (Korean version)

The 2nd Speaker - Myeong Seok Oh

The second speaker was Myeong Seok Oh, currently a student in Korea University. His talk entitled "The Easiest Way to Change the World". How? At the end of his talk he told us about it. During his talk he described his experience when once he almost committed suicide. However, the choice of not killing himself later affected and inspired a lot of people with similar problems. As I remembered from the talk, he made a website where people who has problem can share about their problem, and he will respond to them, urge them not be devastated by their problem and help them find their way to solve the problem. There was one story that a school-girl wrote in the website about her problem and planned to kill herself, and when he responded to the girl, the girl suddenly felt that there is somebody out there that listen to her problem and she didn't feel alone anymore.

Myeong Seok Oh, the 2nd speaker in 6th TEDxKAIST event

In summary of this talk in KAIST Herald, Speaker Myeong Seok Oh spoke about his efforts and campaigns to encourage people to speak up at difficult times rather than blaming themselves for not being able to properly cope with the situation. His active and constants works made the city of Seoul awarded him special prize to recognize his effort, made him as the youngest award recipients at that event. At the end of his talk he concluded the easiest way to change the world is by building an "ARK" at one time. He borrowed this passage from his favorite movie Evan Almighty. "ARK" is abbreviation of Act of Random Kindness. What an inspiring talk, isn't it? Let's ry to build "ARK" from now on.

The 1st TED Talk Video - Sheena Iyengar

The following talk was a related TED Talk with the 6th TEDxKAIST's theme, taken from TEDGlobal 2010. The speaker was Sheena Iyengar and her talk entitled "The Art of Choosing". This was a pretty good and inspiring talk. How she conducted her study about how people choose was really interesting. The introduction about this talk as summarized in TED.com is: Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices -- and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions. Please also find out and enjoy the talk by watching the video below.

1st TED Talk video presented in 6th TEDxKAIST event

The 2nd Section

The Coffee Break & The Ideation Session

After the 1st section we had a coffee break (Dunkin' Donuts sponsored the donuts and coffee) followed by an ideation session. In this ideation session we were randomly grouped into 10 small groups (by special sticker attached to our name tag) and had a topic to be discussed among the participants in the group. I regretted this ideation session because it's mainly conducted in Korean. In my opinion this is a very good session, where we can exchange ideas with the other member in the group. Since the interest of foreigners to attend this event is pretty high, I wish in the later event the organizer will predetermine which group to conduct the ideation session in English or Korean and not directly pre-distribute the participant. I hope they let us the participants to be able to choose which group we want to enter (Korean/English group) with presetting the maximum number of participant in each group. I believe this method will promote good relation among Koreans and foreigners. Anyway, I need to tell this to the organizer, not just complaining here haha... After concluding the ideation session, four participant from different group volunteered to give presentation about what they discussed during ideation session, and there's a prize for best presenter.

The 3rd Section

The 2nd TED Talk Video - Dan Gilbert

The third section was begun by the the TED Talk video of Dan Gilbert whose talk entitled "The Surprising Science of Happiness". This talk was also pretty good and inspiring. He divided the happiness into two, "natural happiness" occurs when we get what we really wanted, and "synthetic happiness" the happiness we choose to pursue when we don't get what we really wanted. The discussion of synthetic happiness brought this talk into the 6th TEDxKAIST because of the similarity to the choosing theme. The summary of this talk as written in the TED.com: Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned. He says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, "Stumbling on Happiness". You can watch his talk by playing the following video

2nd TED Talk video presented in 6th TEDxKAIST

 

The 3rd Speaker - Jeong Weon Lee

Jeong Weon Lee, the 3rd speaker in 6th TEDxKAIST event

Frankly speaking, from all  speakers in the 6th TEDxKAIST event, only his talk I didn't really focus and catch the relation to the event theme. It's because either his talk was less interesting than the other or mainly I was sleepy at that time (even though I already had 2 cup of Americano during coffee break). So, I just put the review of his talk as written in the KAIST Herald aricle: Speaker Jeong Weon Lee, senior researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute (ETRI), emphasized collaboration over teamwork. According to him, Daedok "Teukgoo" (Innopolis) should now rename itself as Daedeok "Japgoo" (looking for workers) to welcome many fields of study as possible. Only then will true collaboration work to produce great creativity ideas.

The 4th Speaker - SooA Yeo

SooA Yeo, the 4th speaker in 6th TEDxKAIST event

The last speaker is currently an undergraduate student in the Dept. of Physics KAIST. His talk entitled "10분으로 만드는 아름다운 세상" which means "10 minutes to make a beautiful world" (according to Google translate). In his talk, he initially described that he previously joined a volunteering program to give tutorial to high school student. However, because the high request of tutorial and sometimes the tutorial location couldn't be easily reached, he started to think alternative way to keep his volunteering work going on. His breakthrough was made by creating the free online resources of pre-university level education namely Chalk Academy.

In my opinion this program is similar to the previously existed Khan Academy, but the approach used in Chalk Academy is a little bit different. He (SooA Yeo) started the Chalk Academy by uploading the tutorial video to the internet, which video shows the tutorial by writing the course material on "chalkboard" (I guessed this is where the name came from). This substitutes the role on previous face to face tutorial method, without  getting rid of the direct tutorial sensation. This method overcomes the problem stated before and starts getting known nationwide. He said the reason he made this online study program based on his believe that the internet service in Korea is capable to reach throughout the country. At last he gave his advice "공부하다가 모른다고 포기하지마" which means "During study if you find some difficulties, do not give up" (maybe he suggested to visit his Chalk Academy website to whom finds difficulty during study)

The 4th Section

The After Party

After the 4th talk, the event was concluded and there was an after party. To join this after party you need to pay additional fee (KRW 10000). The dinner was provided, which Domino's Pizzas and some wines were being served. This section also opened up opportunity to interact among the participant and the speakers. However, because of my another schedule (later told in part 3 of this blog post series) I chose not to join the after party.

The Conlusion

This concludes my summary of 6th TEDxKAIST event. In spite of my little disappointment regarding the souvenirs and ideation session, overall the 6th TEDxKAIST event was really good. I'm really looking forward to participating the next event in the fall semester.

to be continued (part 3)...

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My life in KAIST on the 2nd week of May 2013 - Part 1 (KLcX & G. Rium Concert)

This post is the first part of my life story in KAIST on the 2nd week of May 2013.

KLcX promotional poster

Nothing so special during the weekdays, but approaching the weekend I attended several events held in KAIST. The first one is KISA Languange & Culture Exchange, abbreviated as KLcX (I don't have any idea why they abbreviate the KLcX term like this haha...). It is a brand new program launched by KISA and is organized by my Indonesian friend, Cindy. I was notified about his program by email. Yep, recently most of KISA announcements are published through personal email. I even made a special folder in my email account thus the email from KISA or KISA-related event will go directly to that folder and I can manage them easily.

KLcX promotional brochure

As written in KLcX promotional brochure, this event can be summarized as an event where you are able to meet your partner, share yours and and learn your partner's language and culture in KAIST. It has a goal which is maintaining good relation among international students and local (Korean) student. The background of this event, according to an article in KAIST Herald (vol. 122, page 7, May 2013), was set as the continuation from the previous KISA's Sensitivity Training event. As explained in the article, the Sensitivity Training event which served as open discussion between Korean and international students was perceived to have a lack personal interactions and long term impacts. Thus, Cindy made a proposal to organize one new event (KLcX) similar to Sensitivity Training but with different approach.

As initially designed by the organizer, this event is set as one to one interaction. However, due to difficulty of arranging the "perfect couples" (as illustrated in the brochure), it is expanded into one small group consisted of 3 people. In my case, I want to learn Chinese as 1st priority & Korean as the 2nd priority (I hope my lifetime companion is either Chinese or Korean, by descent or nationality, thus it is better to be "well-prepared" with the language and culture ^^,). Then, I was met with my partner, Yao Min, a Chinese student who wants to learn Korean. Finally, the third person Lee Ji Yi (she didn't come to the first meeting) who is Korean and wants to learn English was added to our group. I guess we could practice the language and cultural sharing by me & Yao Min teach Lee Ji Yi English, Lee Ji Yi teaches Yao Min & I Korean, and Yao Min teaches me Chinese.

In the first meeting I attended on the 2nd Week of May 2013, we met our partner for the first time, exchanged contact information, and talked about our background, etc. Also the requirements of KLcX was also introduced. Those requirements are: each group will be supervised by one mentor from KISA, every group meeting should be documented by the group and notify it to the KISA supervisor either through Facebook, KakaoTalk, or email. There will be another meeting after final exam I guess. The first meeting was finally closed by pizza dinner provided free by KISA. To be honest, free pizza was my second motivation for joining this event haha... It is a natural grad student attitude as portrayed in one comic strip of PHD Comics. In addition, after completing my first KLcX meeting, I caught up with my lab mates to celebrate a newcomer to our lab then played LOL together. That was my second time to play LOL, and I started to enjoy this game since then.

KAIST Spring Culture Festival 2013 G.Rium Concert

After KLcX, in the following day I attended KAIST Spring Culture Festival which featured G.Rium Concert. Well, frankly speaking this G. Rium concert wasn't same as my expectation. Previously in 2012 G. Rium also performed in KAIST Spring Culture festival featuring piano quartet. However, this year G. Rium was not a piano quartet performance, but rather a combination between violin and piano performance, and was made exclusive by the appearance of their special MC. I attended the event not till the end, cause I had experiment appointment. Anyway, this concert, together with another piano concert I attended later, triggered my desire to learn piano. Since then I self-practice to play piano whenever I have time wherever the piano available. I started my piano practice by learning how to play Somewhere in My Memory by John Williams.

to be continued (part 2)...

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My life in KAIST on the 1st week of May 2013

So now I would like to share about my life on 1st week of May 2013.

As I summarized in my previous post, on the 1st week of May I was struggling with my wafer bonding experiment. Yep, currently my research is focused on wafer bonding. As I also mentioned previously, I will discuss about this wafer bonding scientifically in later post. Therefore, long story short this wafer bonding, as explained in Q.-Y. Tong's book, is the experiment conducted by "simply" bringing two different wafers into contact and sticking them directly to each other by the help of either van der Walls force, capillary force or electrostatic force.

Why I quoted the simply term above? Because the basic concept is simple, just bringing them into contact. However, the most important prerequisite prior to contact is the surface of the wafer should be flat, clean and smooth enough, and this ain't an easy jobs. The wafers need to be cleaned by using some series of physical and chemical cleaning process which is not quite simple and sometimes a little bit dangerous, thus it needs to be handled with extra care.

SEM images of the cross section of my successful wafer bonding experiment result

 
Let's look the SEM picture of the bonded wafer's cross section above. Now imagine, what happened if there is dust at the bonding interface? Yes, the surface will not 100% touch each other. Since this is a microscale experiment, the non-existence of dust is really important to promote better surface interaction. After sticking them together, it needs one final step which is a annealing process to strengthen the bond between the wafer. In the first time, I performed this annealing in other lab by the help of my friend.

However, due to the close deadline of the lab meeting (5/4) and the availability of my friend and his machine, I only had a chance to perform the annealing experiment either on Thursday (5/2) or Friday (May 3) evening. It made me confused at that time, since I already planned to attend KAIST-ONE Brazil on Thursday evening coincidentally at the similar time proposed by my friend to do the annealing experiment, and on Friday I aimed to prepare my Saturday lab meeting. These difficult choices needed to be decided immediately.

*When you are facing some difficult choices in your life, don't simply give up. Because your life is actually composed of the choices (C) you make between the day of your birth (B) and death (D). This B-C-D phenomenon will be further discussed in my later post regarding my life on the 2nd week of May 2013, which is attending 6th TEDxKAIST.

Finally, I made my decision. I canceled my plan to attend KAIST-ONE Brazil and did the annealing experiment instead. This choice I considered as one of my good decisions. After annealing, I observed that my experiment was success as you can see in the SEM images above. This long time trial and error experiment turned into first time success. Using this result I prepared my lab meeting presentation on Friday and fortunately the responses from the audiences were mainly positive. FYI, in the grad student life lab meeting is one regular meeting where you present the result of the researches you have been conducting during a certain period of time (honestly for me, it is in principle the period between each of my lab meeting turn). In my perspective, this meeting is really important because the discussion happened during lab meeting can enrich your knowledge and sometimes when you're facing some problems in your research, through the discussion, other lab mates or professor may give some suggestion that may help you to solve your problem. Thus, good preparation for lab meeting is required in order to communicate the result of your researches better.

At last, the disappointment of not attending the KAIST-ONE Brazil was totally gone after completing my lab meeting on that Saturday and gaining some positive feedback to my research. Usually, my habit after completing a lab meeting is relaxing my mind after hard preparation of lab meeting. On that week I chose to have some rest and woke up late on Sunday. After waking up I had some brunch with simultaneously watched Safe Haven, adapted from one of Nicholas Sparks romance novels, in my laptop. Watching some movie or TV series is one of my way of relaxing my mind. In the afternoon I decided to have my Sunday afternoon walk. I fully charged my iPhone battery and then went to the  Gap Stream (갑천) in front of  my campus. I walked along the stream while listening to my mixed albums of Maksim & Bond played by my iPhone. I headed to the east where I finally arrived at Hanbat Arboretum (한밭수목원) after 30 minutes of walking.
 

Some pictures taken at Hanbat Arboretum (한밭수목원) East Arboretum

This arboretum is really big. It has two arboretum wings and huge central plaza in between of these arboretums. At this central plaza many events have been held, i.e. Easter mass, cultural festival, food festival, etc. In the central plaza, you are also able to rent various kind of public bicycle and ride it to look around the plaza. But please be noticed that the bicycle can't enter the arboretum. I got caught before while entering the arboretum using my bicycle by the security in front of arboretum's gate. While I was in the arboretum, I spent most of my time in the east arboretum, sightseeing and enjoying the scenery of blossoming flowers in the blissful spring season. I captured many pictures of the flowers as you can see in my picture collection above. In the end, I totally recommend this nice place to hang out, have some picnic and spend some quality time with your family or your significant other.

So, that's the story of my life on the 1st week of May 2013.

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A Brief of My life at KAIST during May 2013

Well, it's been a while since my last post. Nowadays I get inspired by a group of my junior at KAIST (Iwan team) to keep writing in my blog. As you can see in their blog, they decide to run an informative media to promote the higher education in Korea. It is a pretty nice idea for them, considering they're still an undergraduate student (compared to my undergraduate life, I can say this is awesome and inspiring). I guess that it is mainly influenced by their own experience while pursuing study abroad. So, keep posting guys! Good luck for your project ^_^

Now, come back to my story. In this post I want to tell about my life during May 2013. Why May 2013? Some of you that familiar with Korean culture may guess since I live in Korea, this month is special because it is well known as family month (가정의 달). FYI, Korean people are celebrating 3 special days in this single month. The first one is Children's Day (어린이 날) on May 5th, the second one Parents Day (어버이 날) on May 8th, and the last one Teacher's Day (스승의날) on May 15th. Coincidentally, Buddha's birthday (석가탄신일) in Korea this year is celebrated on May 17th, which is adding the number of holiday in this month (Long Weekend Hopefully ^_^)

Interactive advertising of some events held during May 2013 at KAIST. These advertisement were composed of bunch each single event posters which shaped into their own event identity. From left to right: "피아노" literally read as Piano which indicating the event by KAIST Piano Club, Darth Vader's face indicating the event by KAIST Orchestra which will play the original score of Star Wars, and the last one "ᄇᄋᄇ" literally read as BOB which is abbreviation of Ba-O-Bab an a cappella club at KAIST.

However, frankly speaking there is nothing special with May 2013. I just realized in this month I have a quite tight schedule plan other than daily hectic research yet to be accomplished to balance the quality of my life as graduate student. In addition, so far I really enjoy this particular month than any other months during my stay in Korea. So, let's summarize my life in this month:

KAIST-ONE Brazil

My Experimental Results on 1st Week of May 2013

Gap Stream (갑천)

Hanbat Arboretum (한밭수목원)

• 1st week of May: I was struggling with my wafer bonding experiment. Finally, for the first time I succeeded to bond two different silicon (Si) wafers together. I will talk about this research specifically in the later time. In this week I also planned to attend KAIST-ONE Brazil. But due to my experiment schedule, I canceled to attend this event. It was pretty sad in the beginning (T_T), but later after analyzing my successful experimental results, this feeling was completely disappeared. In addition, this choice was made me able to present my research progress nicely in the weekly Lab meeting. As Sunday is considered as weekend, my story of this week was closed with my nice Sunday afternoon walking along the Gap Stream (갑천), sightseeing in the Hanbat Arboretum (한밭수목원) and also watching some nice movies.

KISA Languange and Culture Exchange (KLcX)

KAIST Spring Culture Festival 2013 G.Rium Concert

6th TEDxKAIST event (Choice between Birth and Death)

PIAST & PIACNU 1st Piano Ensemble "OPERA"

• 2nd Week of May: Nothing special happened during the weekdays. However, approaching the weekend I got a quite busy plan. On Thursday I participated in first meeting of KISA Language and Culture Exchange (KLcX), I got a partner to exchange language and culture who comes from China. Through this KLcX event hopefully I can improve my Chinese language ability and make some new friends. On Friday I attended KAIST Spring Culture Festival which featuring G.Rium Concert, professional artists who were performing classical violin and piano. On Saturday I attended two events, first one inspiring 6th TEDxKAIST event (Choice between Birth and Death) and the second one listening to harmonious melody played by PIAST & PIACNU in their 1st Piano Ensemble "OPERA" which was a Piano concert performed using 2 pianos by 4 piano players using in total 8 hands.

Until this article is published, I just passed the second week of May, so the following weeks are considered as my plan.

• 3rd Week of May: In this week I plan to attend KAIST A Cappella "BAOBAB" concert on Wednesday, KAIST-ONE Malaysia on Thursday (will not miss it), Si-KOMO an outbound event held by KAIST-INA & KAIST Orchestra 21st Spring Annual Concert "TRILOGY" (performing the original score from the best three Trilogy movie of all time: LOTR, Pirates of the Carribean, & Star Wars. I've been dreaming for this kind of play) on Friday, and enjoying the rest of long weekend.

KAIST Spring Culture Festival 2013 Korean National Ballet "Sweet Ballet"

• 4th Week of May: There will be KAIST Spring Student Festival started from Mat 20th to 22nd. Even tough this event is mainly organized by undergraduate student, there will be various booth stands that we can visit. Also in the third day of festival there will also be KISA Food Festival. On the weekend, I plan attend the other performance of KAIST Spring Culture Festival while this time will perform Korean National Ballet "Sweet Ballet" (it is a rare occasion tough) and on Saturday I will busy with my other lab mates to host my lab annual homecoming day.

KAIST Spring Culture Festival 2013 Concert (Park Sae Byul & One More Chance)

• 5th Week of May: So far I only have 2 events I'm planning to attend, which are KAIST-ONE China on May 30th (definitely will not miss this event), and the closing performance of KAIST Spring Culture Festival for this semester, Concert (Park Sae Byul & One More Chance).

So, that is summary of my activities during May 2013. You may find the detail description of each week by simply clicking the week in above hyperlink.

Thank you for reading this. Hope you enjoy it

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