When I was a child, I was always intrigued by how the brain functions. I majored in computer science and wanted to study how we can engineer the computer to think like a human brain. After my daughter was born, I was really fascinated by how babies learn.

For example, once I took my daughter for a hike with my students. When we sat down for tea, my daughter was keen on pouring tea into cups. After she quickly filled all five cups, there were no empty cups left for her to pour tea into. Without any thought, she then made a suggestion: why don’t you guys have a competition to see who can drink the tea fastest? Her idea would enable her to go back to playing the game of pouring tea into empty cups. The reasoning behind what she did as a four-year-old is far beyond the best Artificially Intelligent models we can build in the world today. This also gives hope in terms of how far my research can go as I keep thinking of my daughter.