The joy of reading, as echoed by the book Hidden Library

Ever since I could recall my my memory, I had been enjoying reading. When I was a kid, the ultimate adventure and pleasure would be a weekend trip to a bookstore. My aunts would let me freely roam the store, browsing different subject shelves for a few hours until I was either exhausted or my hands full with books. We would checkout and I would carry the books back like a homesteader carrying firewood from the forest....

March 16, 2025 · 7 min · 1314 words · Tiffena Kou

Why we created FindMyRyokan, a ryokan recommender

Recently I started to blog about a recommender project, Find My Ryokan that I am a PM of. I intend to write a series discussing the motivation, methodology and metrics of the recommender. My first post describes current traveler challenges and what we aim to solve. My second post shows how we use the latest tourism trends to guide our product design.

March 9, 2025 · 1 min · 62 words · Tiffena Kou

How I become a more effective learner

This is a sequel to my MOOC learning journey post, in which I compared the different online learning platforms and recommended good AI/Math/PM courses. In this post, I want to discuss how using metacognition (to be aware of what/how one’s doing and thinking) can improve learning effectiveness, in terms of absorption and knowledge application. Such self-awareness helps you adjust your strategy/approach as needed. It is like having an alter-ego that zooms above you, instrumenting each process and guiding your next step with rational data....

January 27, 2025 · 10 min · 2117 words · Tiffena Kou

Build a second brain with Obsidian as my Knowledge Management System

Current problem As a lifelong learner of a wide range of subjects, I need robust tools to manage my acquired knowledge and act as an idea pad for content creation. My minimalist mindset also requires the number of deployed tools to be as few as possible. This post is a summary of my journey in notetaking with Obsidian. I’m going to go over why Obsidian is a great (although not perfect) tool for notetaking, project management and journaling....

January 17, 2025 · 11 min · 2284 words · Tiffena Kou

2024 in recap - my most favorite content

Winter is a wonderful time to slow down, savor our learnt experiences this year and recap what went well and what we should adjust next year. Like Kari Leibowitz stated in How to Winter, the dark cold season can be enjoyed and utilized with the right mindset. I heed Kari’s advice and recollect the gems I collected in 2023 to align myself in the right direction this year. In 2023, I continued my learning journey both professional and personally....

January 10, 2025 · 9 min · 1818 words · Tiffena Kou

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 · 10 min · 2087 words · Tiffena Kou

Creating Value, Not Just Products Lessons from Keyence

In today’s competitive business landscape, companies often focus their innovative power on creating new products or technologies, but forget to prioritize the most important aspect: creating unique value for their customers. I recently read a book キーエンス 高付加価値経営の論理 on Keyence’s value-added approach and how it contributes to its high profit margin....

September 18, 2024 · 4 min · 1578 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

Too much creativity, or too little humanity in a GenAI priest

Now that generative AI has become a household name, most people has already chatted with a bot whether you’re aware of it or not. Some users are aware of its sporadic shortfalls and especially hallucinations, and thus will deliberately take its output with a grain of salt. In areas such as generating a poem or image for fun, unbound creativity might not hurt that much. But what if it is in a religious setting, when there are straight thresholds for interpretation?...

May 24, 2024 · 5 min · 1034 words · Tiffena Kou

Nakano Yoshihisa on always living in the present moment

Nakano Yoshihisa, a 79-year-old entrepreneur, is a role model I am going to introduce in this blog post. I first came to know him via his book, and was deeply moved by his youthful energy to live everyday as a new journey to explore. who is Nakano Yoshihisa Growing up in post-war years without parents, Nakano was used to living alone and making all decisions by himself. His resume included developing new products/services in various department stores in both Japan and overseas....

March 28, 2024 · 8 min · 1614 words · Tiffena Kou