My learning journey on Coursera

Learning is my biggest hobby, and I am always looking at ways to improve both my skillset and learning methods. As my main professional interest is using NLP to build recommenders, I have been using the kinesthetic learning approach in the past few years, to learn while actually coding personal projects using NLTK, SpaCy and various Japanese language modelling libraries. This approach, while fun and provides instant feedback, lacks a foundational structure....

September 21, 2024 · 15 min · 2988 words · Tiffena Kou

Debunking the creative process : how non-creatives can harness creativity with routines, linking and practice

People often have stereotype or fantasy that artists receive their inspiration from high above, as if the “drop of gift” appear all of a sudden. Wouldn’t it be eye-opening if professionals reveal how that process actually works? In fact, numerous books have been written by artists to disprove the “muse” myth, showing that it is nothing romantic but just consist of routine hard work. In this blog post, I’ll talk about what unites novelist Murakami Haruki, advertising legend James Webb Young and choreographer Twyla Tharp in the creation process....

July 14, 2024 · 9 min · 1832 words · Tiffena Kou

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 3 : Metrics

This is Part 3 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to assist in converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 1 and Part 2, I’ve explained the why and how of the book tracking system. Now let’s dive into implementing the metrics to track our investment. How many books am I reading now?...

June 10, 2022 · 8 min · 1625 words · Tiffena Kou

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 2 : Build the app

This is Part 2 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to help converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 1 I discussed why we need to take an investment view to scrutinize the output of what we read. In this post, I’m going to show you how I build the book tracking system using Google Sheets, Apps Script and AppSheet....

June 1, 2022 · 16 min · 3224 words · Tiffena Kou

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 1 : Learn better

Why we can’t recall what we read This is Part 1 of the “Improve knowledge conversion with book tracking” series. In this series, I will explain why we should build a tracking system to help converting what we read into actionable knowledge. In Part 2 and Part 3 I will explain the technical details of building one. Have you spent a lot of free time reading books, only finding out later that you can’t recall anything?...

May 23, 2022 · 7 min · 1370 words · Tiffena Kou