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CC BY NC SA 4.0 （Unless specified） Welcome, Visitor!
This site is used as the personal blog for Innocentius. Readers could expect varied contents, including tech posts, social science researches, political comments, novel writings, D&D contents, and many more.
Who am I?
My name is Innocentius, 29 y.o., male.
Education Background:
2012-2018: Bachelor of Arts - University of Wisconsin Madison (Computer Sciences, Asian Study, History)
2018-2020: Master of Arts - University of Chicago (Social Sciences, Media Studies)
2021-: PhD Candidate in Management Sciences - University of ******
Research Interests:
My main pursuit is the question of “how do information influence the behaviors of individuals, groups, communities, and societies,” a question puzzling historians, media researchers, and social scientists for the past 200 years. I wrote two of my thesis on Japanese Mass Media and economic & social policies in the interwar periods. I also have a Springer monograph regarding healthcare and a paper on how to mitigate the effect of information explosion during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.
History:
I don’t consider myself as gifted, hard-work, nor was I born with great wealth. My parents though, are different. They fought their ways through the cultural revolution, in which my mother lost her father when she was still in the womb. They were greatly affected by the “Incident”, in which many university students were forced to work in factories and face bad odds for promotion after they graduated. It was an age that did not respect intelligence and free thoughts, and in many ways, some might argue that still is.
I grew up as one of the best of class, one of the best in the whole town, as a matter of fact. I attribute this to the pre-school education my parents gave me, opening my mind to foreign languages and basic knowledges. I skipped grade 6 and 9 due to various circumstances. As a result, I was considerably younger and smaller than my classmate in mid/high school. This could have contributed to the bullying occurred to me, but now that I think back, it wasn’t really terrible.
I started my university education at age of 16 in UW-Madison. Some might already guessed, but I was truly “too young, too simple” at that time. Never had plan myself for any marketable skills or research idea, I suffered greatly from not being able to adapt to the education model of the United States. It wasn’t my language that is the problem, it is my young age, together with the fundamental ideas that “you have to be able to learn yourself” that the education from my home country never told me.
After two years of pushing myself to nowhere in the uni, my GPA was considerably lower than other Asian students. Hope you could understand the feeling. Depression come to me in late 2014, as I started to fail classes, and my university life could come to an end. It was then that I started to take some humanity classes, which I detested at that time, and I met one of the most important professor, teacher, and life-coach in my life. That person understood the situations I was in, and patiently helped me to understand the fundamental of western learning: how to ask questions, independent thinking, when and how to bother a professor with questions, etc. I will be forever in debt to the four person helped me through one of the most difficult time of my life.
I became a straight A student in just one semester. Grateful, I began to wonder why these people helped me, and whether I could become someone like them. Finishing up my study in CS, I turned my view to History and humanity. This is a huge change of trajectory, but it made sense to me then and now. I finished three bachelor degrees in 2018, two with honor and distinction.
During my time at uni honor courses, it is required that we write a graduation article about 60-80 pages long. Obviously I have never done that before. Never had I truly became fascinated about any question in my life. At the time I was under the supervision of my professor in Japanese History. Again, wanting her student to explore and know how to ask questions, she asked me to skim through Japanese newspapers in the early 1900s, so that I might recognize a topic that could pose to be interesting.
The more I dive into these papers, the more I find that I was not becoming interested in a single topic, but the medium itself. The influence of different forms of media can be felt increasingly heavy as we live in the age of Trump, fake news, and Infodemic. As such, I turned my attention towards trying to explain the influence and position of traditional media in the perspective of History. My bachelor thesis: “The Steering Wheel of Capital: The Role of Newspaper Coverage in Centralization of the Japanese Economy during the Showa Financial Crisis, 1920-1927” was built exactly on that.
Pursuing higher education, I was accepted by both the social science division of UChicago and east asia study department of Columbia University. A great divergence, but considering the my question concerns mostly about media but not east asia, I thought UChicago would be a better choice. My master thesis, titled: “Evolving while Unchanging: Asahi Shimbun reportage on the Gold Standard issue, 1917-1929” was built on mostly the same promise, delivering the history of Japanese politics and economy from the perspective of mass media.
After that though, I find myself conflicted about my pursuit and goals. History is about “story”, it is how to tell it and how to convince people that you have a legit perspective. It does not form a universal applicable principle. Many, including my advisor in UChicago, at that time, think that media was a group of entity without their own initiatives and their influence on society was mostly a red herring. I couldn’t convince these people with out of touch “History”. I have to make it mathematical, quantitative, logical, and current.
Well, turns out I did not need to prove the influence of media on our society. The 2020 Covid Pandemic and the corresponding Infodemic was here. Studies have already shown that the Infodemic contributed to and caused vaccine hesitancy and many irrational behaviors. The question remains then, is how much, and how to prevent similar events in the future.
So that is what I’m working on now. Instead of qualitative, let’s do quantitative. Instead of historical event, let’s do ‘now’. Instead of historical perspective, let’s do data science and machine learning.
This is who I am, what I’m passionate about, and what I will do.
Yet, from the beginning I wasn’t really prepared for such a road. I learnt how to programme, yet I never had the math background to keep in touch with the frontline of scientific research, such as Deep Learning. Oh how stupid I was when listening to my peers reporting their study for the first time – I didn’t think I belong there. Thanks to the unending patience of my mentor, I had some time to learn, to understand, and to adapt the skillset – machine learning, deep learning, graph theories, bayesian network, etc. To brush up the other skills, I co-published an academic monograph on Springer in 2022.
My mentor had high patience, yet also high hope for what I could achieve (and to be honest, so do I). I had (and still have) a great topic, yet it must be adapted to suit the need for academia, for journals, and for the benefit of the mentor himself. During this process, I met another precious individual who taught me how to organize a narrative to suit the need for publishment of the highest regards. My first paper is already published online in 2025 in a journal within the UTD-24 lists.
Frankly, there is still a lot to do. The problem caused by media has only grown during the past years, and there is an abundance of topics for me to choose. The question is which one.
Skillsets:
- Versatile Programming Skills (C, C++, C#, HTML5, Java, Python, Ruby, etc.)
- Interdisciplinary Research Skills (History, Social Science, Political Science, Media Studies, Management Sciences)
- High Public Speaking Skills (Well you couldn’t tell here for sure.)
- Languages with near-native fluency (Japanese, Chinese, English)
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Please, enjoy your stay here.
If you want to contact me, you could always find the link in the sidebar, behind my avatar.
Alternatively, you could leave a comment below. I’ll respond as soon as I see them.