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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Peniruan Akun Facebook (Akun "Klonengan")

Sesuai dengan judul diatas, posting-an kali ini akan membahas tentang kasus peniruan akun facebook (istilah kaskus-nya akun "klonengan") yang dialami beberapa teman saya.

Cerita ini dimulai pada hari Sabtu (2013/04/20), ketika sedang makan siang saya menerima pesan facebook dari teman saya. Pesan tersebut ditujukan kepada saya dan beberapa teman lainnya. Pada pesan tersebut, teman saya ingin meminta tolong untuk melaporkan beberapa akun facebook klonengan (yang menggunakan nama samaran) yang meniru akun facebook dia dan beberapa temannya yang lain. Setelah selesai makan siang, saya kemudian balik ke kamar, membuka laptop dan akun facebook saya, lalu melaporkan akun-akun klonengan tersebut.

Yang unik dari kasus akun facebook klonengan ini adalah akun-akun tersebut dibuat dengan tidak hanya menggunakan photos, profile picture dan cover picture yang diperoleh dari akun facebook asli teman-teman saya, tetapi dari beberapa status yang di-posting pada akun facebook klonengan tersebut dapat diketahui juga bahwa akun klonengan tersebut melakukan peniruan terhadap kehidupan pribadi dari teman-teman saya tersebut. What a freak!, itu juga yang saya pikirkan ketika mengetahui permasalahan ini lebih dalam.

Dikaji lebih jauh, didapati bahwa akun-akun klonengan tersebut saling berhubungan satu dan lainnya (friend with each other), dan beberapa diantaranya dibuat private sehingga sulit untuk dikorek lebih dalam apabila belum berstatus friend dengan akun klonengan tersebut. Kami masih terus mencari tahu siapa dalang dibalik peniruan akun-akun facebook ini. Kami mencurigai bahwa dalang dari kasus ini mungkin satu orang. Namun jika dipikir kembali, kami merasa geli juga mendapati bahwa jika dalang peniruan tersebut hanya satu orang, maka dia membuat beberapa akun facebook, membuat status, lalu memberi komentar sendiri menggunakan akun klonengan lainnya yang dibuat (really, that's a total freak). Tapi sampai dengan saat ini kami belum mengetahui siapa kira2 dalangnya (akan saya update kembali post ini apabila ada perkembangan menarik).

Tapi terlepas dari semua itu,terdapatnya kasus akun klonengan ini dapat dianggap sebagai suatu cyber crime. Walaupun sampai dengan saat ini belum nampak ada kerugian bagi pemilik akun asli yang dicatut foto-fotonya, tapi tindakan ini tidak boleh dibiarkan berlanjut lebih jauh. Bisa saja suatu saat akun klonengan tersebut digunakan untuk melakukan pencemaran nama baik atau bahkan perbuatan tidak diinginkan lainnya yang dapat merugikan pemilik akun asli tersebut. Oleh karena itu, apabila anda menemukan kasus serupa, segeralah untuk melaporkan akun klonengan tersebut. Selain itu, ada baiknya untuk memproteksi akun anda sehingga mencegah kasus peniruan serupa. Proteksi dapat dilakukan dengan cara mengatur privacy & account setting yang tersedia pada halaman timeline facebook anda pada pojok kanan atas. Aturlah siapa saja yang bisa mengakses foto-foto dan hal-hal yang ada posting di facebook untuk mencegah orang-orang yang tidak berkepentingan melakukan hal-hal yang tidak dinginkan.

Okay, at last my advice is "Remember! Always be careful with internet"

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TED: Technology, Entertaiment, and Design

Hi all!

Welcome to my second post on this blog. Today I would like to share about TED. What is your first thought when hear about TED? Is it a movie named TED? Or is it the Teddy Bear that you may think of? Or even Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother? It is common if you think about those previous examples, but that's not what I will share today (I also mistook it when the first time I heard about TED).

Atmosphere during a TED conference

TED which I will share today is an abbreviation of TED: Technology Entertaiment and Design. It is one kind of special conference that initially focused on the development of recent Technology, Entertainment and Design. In the TED conference, each presenter will give a lecture referred as "TED Talks" which is ranging from about 3 minutes up to 20 minutes. In its beginning the lecture series covered the topics that focus on the three category listed in the TED's abbreviation, but as time goes by, the scope of the talks have been expanded to cover broader area of expertise. Don't be scared about the lecture (talks), it is not like the official university or school lecture, but rather like a simple - but usually awesome, mostly inspirational, and sometimes mind-blowing - talk that will definitely enrich your knowledge or at least increase your awareness of the certain things discussed in the talks. It has a wide range of presenter, including students (from elementary up to graduate student), researchers, university professors, artists, famous people, Nobel prize laureates, and many more other speakers from all around the world.

It has a main slogan ideas worth spreading, and also in the beginning IBM sponsored most of the conferences and made me usually saw additional slogan let's make a smarter planet. As you can see through its slogans, in the beginning it was subjected to provide a conference which accommodates and encourages people to share and exchange ideas. As I remember from one TED talk I watched, William Noel: Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes, it said that "the thing to do with data, if you want it to survive, is to let it out and have everybody have it", it is also well applied to an idea. Thus if you share it properly, not only the idea will be spread, but it may also stimulate collaboration with different people with various idea to improve the existing idea. That's what we called the power of sharing, and why this program is great. In addition, you may also read the mission of TED itself as written on its wikipedia page

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other

It is undoubtedly great, isn't it?

As time goes by, this program is gaining more popularity. Recently many TED talks are held in all parts of the world. Compare to the initial program that a certain number of people gathered around in the annual conference which is held in Long Beach, nowadays many TEDx event, a TED-like event, which in the spirit of TED mission are held at the local level. This event is similar to the main event held in Long Beach, but organized independently by many different people which should be previously granted the TED license. I once attended the TEDx event held in my campus, which in my opinion was a great opportunity to meet and discuss with brilliant speakers which may inspire our lives. My other favorite TEDx event is TEDxCaltech because of its special main theme on every event (first one was about Richard Feynman, and the second one mainly discussed about brain).

Jill Tarter (TED Prize 2009)

Bill Clinton (TED Prize 2007)

"U2" Bono (TED Prize 2005)

In addition TED also annually gives TED Prizes. The winner of TED Prize will be granted a certain amount of money (as of 2013 it is USD 1,000,000) and given opportunity to talk in annual TED main conference to share about their "wish to change the world". Through their "wish talk", they describe about what they dream in order to change in this world into a better place and in the end ask the people of the world together to help them to turn their dream into reality. As of 2013 many famous figures and organizations have been awarded the prize, i.e., Jill Tarter, Bill Clinton, "U2" Bono, etc., which their wishes are related to support for scientific researches, improvement of healthcare systems, poverty alleviation, etc.

TED.com view as of April 20th 2013

In contrast with its first installment which was exclusively held in Long Beach, nowadays, thanks to the internet, we are now able to access new TED talk everyday via TED.com and it is totally free, thanks again to Creative Common licenses. This website is regularly visited by millions of people in a single day, and one nice quote from TED curator, Chris Anderson, about the website:

"...it used to be 800 people getting together once a year; now it’s about a million people a day watching TEDTalks online. ... The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world."

TED.com provides high quality TED Talk videos which can be viewed either online streaming or offline download (*.mp4 file). A full written transcript of the entire talk is also available. In the spirit of TED to share ideas to the world which not all of its people are able to understand English, an open translation program has been launched which facilitated the non-English speaking country audiences to enjoy the talk by the existence of various language subtitles. But unfortunately, this subtitle only available online (T_T)

That's all what I wanted to share about TED. Now you can experience it by yourself by simply clicking a link below

TED.com

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Hello World!

Hello World!

That's the first thing anyone will try in their first course of programming.

Since this is my first post, I think I should write the "Hello World!" as well. This also serves as my greeting to the world of internet through my first blog post.

From now on I will try to keep posting regularly what inside my mind, what I recently think of, and everything else that may crosses my mind. Thus, I name my blog as Pramudita's Mind. If you wanna learn more about me, please look inside my profile beside -->

So, here we are, me starting blogging.

Hello World!

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