[{"content":"Introduction Exactly one week ago marked the start of my first summer research opportunity. The past seven days have served as a brief glimpse into the world of academia, and have set the scene for the next seven weeks of my life.\nResearch has always been something that fascinated me. The idea of being able to pursue knowledge for the sake of advancing our collective understanding of the universe as a career seems fantastical. However, after a few weeks of writing essays, applying to programs, and participating in interviews, I get to sample that dream at The Ohio State University.\nI was recruited by Dr. Martijn IJtsma at OSU’s Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory to make contributions to the lab’s work in modeling and simulating work in human-machine teams (HMTs). Over the past few years, I’ve developed an affinity for computational modeling, especially modeling complex systems like work dynamics in HMTs. To say I was pleasantly surprised and excited when I initially received his email of expressed interest in my application would be a criminal understatement.\nWhat the hell is Cognitive Systems Engineering? … is the question that I initially asked myself when Dr. IJtsma reached out to me. I understood the description of his computational modeling work in his email, but the field of “systems engineering”, and especially “cognitive systems engineering,” was new to me.\nThe definition I was able to piece together after researching the laboratory and reading some of the related literature was as follows:\n“\nCognitive systems engineering (CSE) is a discipline studying how people think and act in systems with many dynamic and interdependent parts (both human and automata). The goal is to design systems that best support people’s natural cognition in terms of decision making, problem solving, and task completion.\n“\nIf you think that looks like a lot of jargon and overly academic terminology, welcome to the club. But to boil it down, we study how to make sure people can do their jobs in situations where they have to also work with other tools, people, and robots.\nA good example, and Dr. IJtsma’s specialty, is aviation. Pilots have to coordinate with co-pilots, ground control, autopilot, and work with all of the other technology available to them. How can we minimize the cognitive demand of this system of making a plane get from A to B? This idea can be extrapolated to a ton of other important fields, like nuclear management (ever heard of Three Mile Island?), healthcare, or even outer-space operations.\nSo what do I do? Dr. IJtsma and his team have been working with a simulation framework called Work Models that Compute (WMC). Essentially, it’s a method of simulating an environment where multiple workers (agents) have to complete individual tasks (take action), while working together. Agents are limited by the resources available in the environment, their dependencies on other agents, and their general capability in taking certain actions.\nIt’s an exceptionally useful tool for envisioning how to discover the necessary tools and agents for a job, and to determine who does what. As a very vague and general example, it can help determine if the work will be done faster if Agent A does Task 1 or if Agent B does Task 1.\nMy job is to work with Dr. IJtsma and a graduate student in the lab to use WMC to design a framework that can help determine the best sequence and timing of actions in a work environment. Agents are often interdependent, meaning they require other agents to finish their tasks or produce some resource before they can act. So if Agent A requires Agent B to do Task 1 before it can do Task 2, how can we schedule who does what and when to optimize performance?\nIt seemed a bit silly to me at first. “Just schedule it right after, obviously.” However, what if the agents have limited communication? What if there’s a third agent that also depends on Task 1, and needs the results sooner than Agent A does?\nThis computational analysis of task organization, agent interdependencies, and communication–coordination–is the heart of what I’ll be spending the next two months on.\nFinal Remarks If my explanations weren’t entirely clear, I apologize. To be frank, I’m just starting to get a hold on the intricacies of the discipline and on the exact work I’m involved in. However, I understand a little more about CSE every day, and I hope to form a solid foundation in the coming weeks.\nI am exceptionally excited and grateful to have this opportunity. I understand how lucky I am to be able to participate in professional academic research as a rising third-year undergraduate.\nFamiliarizing myself with the field’s literature and fundamental concepts over the past couple of weeks has been some of the most fun I’ve had reading and learning in years, and I’m confident my enthusiasm will only grow as I dive deeper into this project.\nThanks for reading!\n","permalink":"https://andreprakash.com/posts/babys-first-research-experience/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"introduction\"\u003eIntroduction\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eExactly one week ago marked the start of \u003ca href=\"https://u.osu.edu/csel/member-directory/andre-prakash/\"\u003emy first summer research opportunity\u003c/a\u003e. The past seven days have served as a brief glimpse into the world of academia, and have set the scene for the next seven weeks of my life.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eResearch has always been something that fascinated me. The idea of being able to pursue knowledge for the sake of advancing our collective understanding of the universe as a career seems fantastical. However, after a few weeks of writing essays, applying to programs, and participating in interviews, I get to sample that dream at The Ohio State University.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Baby's First Research Experience"},{"content":"Productivity Guilt I struggle with productivity guilt. Always feeling like there\u0026rsquo;s a more efficient way to spend my time, like I\u0026rsquo;m wasting it in some way or another.\nHowever, recently I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the nature of \u0026ldquo;wasted time\u0026rdquo;. What turns time spent into time wasted? After some thinking, I believe I\u0026rsquo;ve reached the conclusion that it\u0026rsquo;s far more difficult to actually waste time than some might think, although it is definitely still possible.\nThe Forms of Productivity Productivity is something I would consider foundational to my identity, and I believe it\u0026rsquo;s important to always be making progress towards a greater goal or sense of self. But something I\u0026rsquo;m only starting to understand is that progress takes on many forms.\nActive Productivity Of course, there is the cookie-cutter image of progress: completing tangible tasks. These tasks can also be subdivided into those that are external and those that are self-imposed. This version of progress is the one that feels most productive, and it\u0026rsquo;s the only version I believed existed until recently.\nWe put so much emphasis on this \u0026ldquo;active\u0026rdquo; model of productivity because ticking off tasks not only provides immediate feedback and a consequential dopamine hit, but in many cases, it also incites external validation.\nMaintenance Productivity Next, there\u0026rsquo;s maintenance productivity, another widely recognized mode of making progress.\nHumans are (unfortunately) incapable of redlining their physiological engines 24/7, and more often than not, sleep alone is insufficient rest for the constant stress and stimuli we expose ourselves to. We need time to do restorative activities that give the brain and body time to recover.\nTo any skeptical reader who assumes that rest is for the weak and the grind never stops (as I was and still sometimes am), there is real science behind why rest is important for preserving your mind. I don\u0026rsquo;t want to turn this into a scientific paper, but among other biological factors, mental exertion results in a buildup of metabolites that inhibit your cognition. Not taking breaks is the same as making an active effort to not reach your goals.\nPassive Productivity Lastly, the mode of progress I only recently discovered and one that I think is most overlooked, is passive productivity.\nThis has some overlap with maintenance productivity, in that it represents (almost\u0026ndash;I\u0026rsquo;ll touch on this in a moment) everything that isn\u0026rsquo;t a tangible step forward your goals. Playing video games, reading fiction, socializing, working on passion projects, etc. These activities are often categorized as leisure, separate from \u0026ldquo;real productivity\u0026rdquo;, but I think that perspective is misguided.\nWhether we\u0026rsquo;re aware of it or not, the brain is constantly working and processing. I\u0026rsquo;ve recently been reading more on human psychology, and while I haven\u0026rsquo;t even scratched the surface of the iceberg that is understanding the brain, one common theme consistently reappears: the two minds. Whether it\u0026rsquo;s Malcom Gladwell\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;unconscious thinking\u0026rdquo;, Daniel Kahneman\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;System 2\u0026rdquo;, or Barbara Oakley\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;diffuse mode\u0026rdquo;, it\u0026rsquo;s undeniable that there is a region of our brain constantly working in the background.\nThis is how leisure becomes productive; standard task-oriented and maintenance productivity tend to the conscious mind and the physical body, but passive productivity tends to the unconscious.\nCircling back to Oakley, I really like her description of the brain\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;diffuse mode\u0026rdquo;. She talks about how although most active work is done in \u0026ldquo;focus mode\u0026rdquo;, where direct attention is given to a specific problem, the brain\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;diffuse mode\u0026rdquo; forms subconscious mental connections to gain a better understanding of the problems it faced while in focus mode. This is the essence of creativity, and is why completing tasks that may not necessarily seem immediately productive is critical to grow and progress towards greater goals.\nExposing yourself to new experiences creates more nodes to form connections with in the background. Although you may not actively see how time spent playing video games could serve any purpose in your professional life, the novel mental bridges built during your \u0026ldquo;leisure\u0026rdquo; could ultimately be a critical part of the path needed to solve an otherwise unsolvable problem.\nSo is that it? Everything is productive? You can forget about any of your life plans and party rock for the rest of your days?\nNot quite.\nWhat is Unproductive? One critical element of diffuse mode thinking is that it only works provided sufficient stimulus and proper instruction. Sure, connections are always being formed in the background, but the purpose of these connections is to tie loose ends into something greater. Without some sort of active productivity, these connections will be made purposelessly.\nConsider clean energy, like solar, hydro, and wind. Nature will produce these forces regardless of what we do, but bouts of active effort can set up systems that will utilize them productively.\nMoreover, there is a subset of activities that I do believe is entirely unproductive: completely passive consumption (e.g., doomscrolling, mindless binge watching).\nI\u0026rsquo;m painfully aware of this cliche \u0026ldquo;self-help\u0026rdquo; advice, but I thought it would be interesting to consider the topic of passive content consumption from the perspective of these three modes of productivity. This doesn\u0026rsquo;t classify as active productivity, clearly, but what about maintenance or passive productivity?\nMaintenance productivity refers to activities that take your body and mind away from complex stimuli, and give them a chance to rest and recover. Aimless content consumption, although seemingly not requiring an active cognitive effort, is still activating the brain, stressing your central nervous system. It isn\u0026rsquo;t restorative, and the mental space allocated for it distracts unconscious connections from being formed.\nSo it isn\u0026rsquo;t active or maintenance productivity, but what about passive productivity? You\u0026rsquo;re still consuming knowledge, so it should still be forming useful nodes for your diffuse mode to act on, right?\nSort of. Content consumption can definitely be a form of passive productivity, but not through doomscrolling or similar mindless activities.\nFor the mental connections that characterize passive productivity to be formed, a sense of presence in the moment is required. Consider this: do you have any recollection of any of the last few videos you watched during your last scrolling session? More importantly, did you consciously make the decision to engage in your last scrolling session?\nDon\u0026rsquo;t get me wrong, passive productivity does not mean remembering everything you do and consume. Rather it means intentionally choosing your activities and being mentally present during them.\nConcluding Statement And that\u0026rsquo;s what this all really boils down to. As a TL;DR to this article: wasted time is time spent unintentionally. It\u0026rsquo;s important to make active efforts towards your goals, accomplishing definite goals and completing tangible tasks, but the other activities that fill your day are often just as important to building the brain and character of the person you want to be through the engagement of maintenance and passive productivity.\n","permalink":"https://andreprakash.com/posts/wasted-time---what-it-means-to-be-productive/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"productivity-guilt\"\u003eProductivity Guilt\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI struggle with productivity guilt. Always feeling like there\u0026rsquo;s a more efficient way to spend my time, like I\u0026rsquo;m wasting it in some way or another.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHowever, recently I\u0026rsquo;ve been thinking about the nature of \u0026ldquo;wasted time\u0026rdquo;. What turns time spent into time wasted? After some thinking, I believe I\u0026rsquo;ve reached the conclusion that it\u0026rsquo;s far more difficult to actually waste time than some might think, although it is definitely still possible.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Different Forms of Productivity: What is Wasted Time?"},{"content":"Introduction For context, I\u0026rsquo;ve always been considered a \u0026ldquo;good student\u0026rdquo;, and I say that with no boastful intention. I\u0026rsquo;m the run-of-the-mill \u0026ldquo;A\u0026rdquo; student, always ready to do extra credit and succeed in the eyes of whoever is evaluating me.\nBut recently I\u0026rsquo;ve come to the realization that this title and identity is entirely worthless in the context of actual knowledge, growth, and understanding the world around me. Some of this is a consequence of my own faults, but I feel as though much of this hollowness can be attributed to the system that raised my intellectual self.\nRewarding the Wrong Thing The common argument against the traditional educational system is its emphasis on rote memorization. This discussion has been beaten to death, and is not what I want to discuss. Moreover, the ability to memorize and retain some information is a critical skill to have, regardless of the tools available in the contemporary world.\nMore than the emphasis on memorization, the rewarding of hollow knowledge is the primary fault and root of many of the issues I have with schooling.\nEducational \u0026ldquo;success\u0026rdquo; is established by performance on exams, homework, essays, and other similarly repetitive and regurgitative formats. In theory, these mechanisms are methods of measuring a student\u0026rsquo;s understanding of a given subject. However, they ultimately fail to do so because students, like myself, prioritize performance on these examinations over meaningfully understanding the topic at hand.\nThe question turns from \u0026ldquo;What does this mean?\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;What would make it look like I know this?\u0026rdquo;. Students optimize their learning to fit the schema of traditional assessments, falling victim to the cognitive bias of overfitting and becoming unable to apply their knowledge to new domains.\nHustle Culture and the Consequences of Overfitting Furthermore, the format of schooling misguidedly encourages \u0026ldquo;the grind\u0026rdquo; in a way that\u0026rsquo;s unproductive and ultimately harmful to the cognitive and emotional health of a student. I see it all the time on Reddit and other social media platforms: people bragging about the tens of hours they\u0026rsquo;ve spent studying, the thousands of words worth of notes they\u0026rsquo;ve written, etc.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve fallen victim to the phenomenon myself, feeling proud for grinding out pages upon pages of practice problems with the hope of squeezing out an extra percentage point on the next exam. After all, the questions are guaranteed to follow the literal textbook format, so why do anything else?\nSchools encourage this behavior. Circling back to the concept of overfitting, the more data points available to you, the more accurately you can fit the curve of academic success. In my personal experience, I can absolutely vouch for the effectiveness of doing practice problems until your brain goes numb.\nHowever, the more tightly fit you are to such a curve, the more inaccurate the results become for any other metric; you lose your ability to generalize.\nEndorsing \u0026ldquo;the grind\u0026rdquo; accomplishes the goal of ingraining the idea that doing more work, doing more of what you\u0026rsquo;re told, is what defines success. And if the goal of the system was to produce the perfect machine, the perfect executioner of an instruction set, then they would be successful.\nBut that isn\u0026rsquo;t, or at least shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be, the mission. The mission should be to produce a responsive, adaptive, and critical thinker.\nProviding Immediate Feedback Recently, I\u0026rsquo;ve tried to make an effort to seek out new ideas and learn from sources outside of a school environment. Read more literature, consume the perspectives of experts in various fields, and admittedly, use artificial intelligence to research the topics I\u0026rsquo;m fascinated in. However, I find the process much harder to drag myself through without the instant feedback and positive affirmations given by traditional schooling.\nTrue learning is filled with delayed gratification; individual efforts make little difference, but they eventually compound and interact with one another in complex ways to produce emergent rewards. But schooling treats learning like a simple, linear, input-output scheme. Consume information in one context, repeat it in the same context, get a reward, repeat.\nLearning is an extremely enjoyable process, and I feel as though most people would agree if they redefined learning outside of the context of traditional schooling. We\u0026rsquo;re innately curious creatures, and have a neuroplastic brain wired to consume information and form connections. But traditional education impairs this superpower by forcing conformation to a rigid rubric and fragmenting our capacity to accept delayed gratification.\nEnding Notes I sincerely believe that every person has a drive to understand the world around them, or at least some specific part of it. I don\u0026rsquo;t have exact solutions for the problems I\u0026rsquo;ve outlined here, this is simply an airing of my personal grievances, and I hope to build upon what I\u0026rsquo;ve started here in the future.\nIf you relate at all to the problems I\u0026rsquo;ve been facing, I implore you to try and pursue education through other domains.\nEngage your innate drive to learn by seeking knowledge without a rubric to follow, understand that real learning doesn\u0026rsquo;t have immediate feedback, and try to fall in love with the process rather than an empty reward.\n","permalink":"https://andreprakash.com/posts/why-the-school-system-failed-me/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"introduction\"\u003eIntroduction\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor context, I\u0026rsquo;ve always been considered a \u0026ldquo;good student\u0026rdquo;, and I say that with no boastful intention. I\u0026rsquo;m the run-of-the-mill \u0026ldquo;A\u0026rdquo; student, always ready to do extra credit and succeed in the eyes of whoever is evaluating me.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut recently I\u0026rsquo;ve come to the realization that this title and identity is entirely worthless in the context of actual knowledge, growth, and understanding the world around me. Some of this is a consequence of my own faults, but I feel as though much of this hollowness can be attributed to the system that raised my intellectual self.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Why the School System Failed Me"},{"content":"Why hello there, I\u0026rsquo;m Andre I\u0026rsquo;m a second-year Computer Science undergrad trying to figure out where to go from here.\nStatus Location: NorCal Role: Student Current Mission(s): Research cognitive systems and computational modeling at The Ohio State University Building this website and writing Become a better creator What is this place? This is just my little corner of the internet, where you can find my software work and some of my writing.\n","permalink":"https://andreprakash.com/about/","summary":"\u003ch1 id=\"why-hello-there-im-andre\"\u003eWhy hello there, I\u0026rsquo;m Andre\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m a second-year Computer Science undergrad trying to figure out where to go from here.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"status\"\u003eStatus\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLocation:\u003c/strong\u003e NorCal\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRole:\u003c/strong\u003e Student\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCurrent Mission(s):\u003c/strong\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eResearch cognitive systems and computational modeling at The Ohio State University\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBuilding this website and writing\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBecome a better creator\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"what-is-this-place\"\u003eWhat is this place?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is just my little corner of the internet, where you can find my software work and some of my writing.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"About"}]