Hello Asuka

A blog about my PhD journey at the UT Austin | Portugal CoLab program. My research interests focus on Affective Computing, Positive Computing and Human-Computer Interaction.

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Fake it ‘til you become it

Infographic about Amy Cuddy’s amazing TED talk.

Don’t forget to power pose!! 

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Anticipating Your Needs: Emotional Intelligence Is the Key to Smarter Gadgets - Singularity HUB

It’s weekend rush hour. You’re stuck in traffic. You got cut off. You’re increasingly frustrated. Your heart rate and blood pressure skyrocket. As you’re fuming in traffic, an inconspicuous device... read more

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The New York Times on Instagram: “At @franklinbbq in Austin, Texas, people pull up at dawn and spend their breakfast hours waiting for lunch. Rain or shine, 6 days a week,…”

“At @franklinbbq in Austin, Texas, people pull up at dawn and spend their breakfast hours waiting for lunch. Rain or shine, 6 days a week, hundreds wait 3…”

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No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.

Marvin Minsky

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Marvin Minsky, Artificial Intelligence And Computer Science Visionary, Dies At 88

Marvin Minsky was a pioneer, someone who was thinking one step ahead of anyone else. He was a founding father when it comes to artificial intelligence and..

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How One Intelligent Machine Learned to Recognize Human Emotions | MIT Technology Review

Nobody knew how to identify people’s emotional states by looking at their brain waves. Then a machine learning algorithm stepped in.

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How effective are mental health apps? (Wired UK)

With mental health apps on the rise, WIRED looks at just how clinically effective they are

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Journal article introductions

From my writing course, a set of four moves that underpin many journal articles in the social sciences and humanities. Accompanies a blog post on patthomson.net

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The Hawthorne Effect

The Hawthorne effect is a term referring to the tendency of some people to work harder and perform better when they are participants in an experiment. Individuals may change their behavior due to the attention they are receiving from researchers rather than because of any manipulation of independent variables.

from http://psychology.about.com/od/hindex/g/def_hawthorn.htm

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In 1966, a German psychiatrist named Leuner wrote an article called ‘Emotional Intelligence and emancipation’ in which he hypothesised that the reason some women willfully rejected the social roles and responsibilities that were expected of them was because of their ‘low Emotional Intelligence’. As a cure, he prescribed a combination of LSD-induced hallucinatory ‘trips’ and psychotherapy.

exerpt from An intelligent look at Emotional Intelligence, by Guy Claxton

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Fitbit Unveils Blaze Smart Fitness Watch With Color Touch Screen

Today at CES 2016, Fitbit has unveiled the latest generation of its smart fitness watch in the Fitbit Blaze. With the Blaze, the company is looking to be..

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English Grammar and Essay Writing

An introduction to academic writing for English Language Learners, focusing on essay development, grammatical correctness, and self-editing.

Did you resolve to improve your writing this year? Here's your opportunity!

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Christmas coffee break 🎄☕️#christmas2015 #coffee #Starbucks #coffeetime

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“Why did we program it to recognize sarcastic compliments?”

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PhD skills 101: Speed Reading

Since reading lots of papers and books is crucial in a PhD, speed reading seems like an obvious skill to pursue.

Usually, the faster you read, the less you understand. Still, speed reading can be useful when you just want to do that first-passage skimming to get a general sense of the text, or to check if a paper is worth reading at all.

I learned that my two biggest reading “time-wasters” are subvocalization (consciously ”hearing” the words in your mind) and regression (going back to re-read a passage of text). I found that I do this a lot, even when I have understood the text perfectly - it seems it’s just a bad habit I somehow developed. Practicing speed reading has helped me to overcome this to a certain extent.

I also find that speed reading is a nice way to train my concentration - usually I want to stop after just 5 minutes into it, but I try to push through and not let my mind wander away...

I use Spreed, which is a nice Chrome extension, to read articles and papers on the web. You can also copy+paste the text. There’s also a nice iPad app I use to read articles I store on Pocket and such, called ReadQuick.

Lastly, you can test your speed reading skills here. What speed do you read? It seems I can read 419 words per minute, which is slightly below the average college student... *sigh*... It looks like I must keep practicing...