<![CDATA[Rick Sugden: Decoding Waves - Blog]]>Fri, 09 Aug 2024 03:18:56 -0400Weebly<![CDATA[How to win graduate scholarships]]>Thu, 08 Aug 2024 13:02:58 GMThttp://ricksugden.weebly.com/blog/how-to-win-graduate-scholarshipsFor Canadian graduate students, scholarship season is just around the corner – this time with more money available than ever before. My name is Rick Sugden, I’m a PhD Candidate at University of Toronto studying the use of brain wearables to monitor brain tumours at home. Over my academic career, I have won several scholarships such as CGSD, CGSM, OSOTF, OGS, entrance scholarship and community service awards totalling to almost $200’000. I have condensed everything I have learned from mentors and the application process to create the document I wish I had as an applicant. I hope you find it helpful too!

The Application

In the 2024 budget, the Canadian Government has not only increased the value of national graduate scholarships but will be handing out more than 1700 additional awards every year (a substantial increase). With more money than ever on the table for students, having a great scholarship application has never been more important.
The process to apply has been streamlined. Instead of three different agencies you have to choose from (NSERC, CIHR, SSHRC), they have now been unified into the “New Talent Award” valued at 40K for three years for PhD students and 27K for Master’s students.
In the past, the application has consisted of the following:
  • 2 reference letters
  • a CV + transcript
  • a personal statement
  • a project proposal

Reference Letters

I put these first because they are perhaps the simplest. Yet I’m surprised how many people have asked me who they should ask for their letters. Let’s put that to rest.
Supervisor > previous supervisor (<2 years ago) > committee member > previous supervisor (more than 2 years ago) > class professor.
At least 2 months in advance, start sending requests starting at the top of this list. The most important, by a wide margin, is having your supervisor’s support. If you are already a student with a supervisor, I would say this is mandatory. If you are an incoming student who hasn’t chosen a lab yet, that’s okay. I applied to CGSM while still in undergrad and didn’t have a future supervisor.

Curriculum Vitae

In past years, they have specifically asked for a “Canadian Common CV” (CCV).
When first getting started, it’s not obvious at all how to make a CCV. Here’s how:
  1. You need to use their website. https://ccv-cvc.ca/indexresearcher-eng.frm 
  2. Make an account and login
  3. In the menu bar, go to CV.
  4. When the drop-down appears, click funding
  5. You used to be able to choose your funding type (CIHR Academic, NSERC, CGSM, etc.). Choose the funding template that is closest to this description, as it may change in coming months.
  6. Fill out each field.
  7. To actually see the CCV, you can click preview. This won’t give you a good copy but will tell you what order things appear, identify repeats, and give you a general sense of what it looks like.
  8. To obtain the final copy, click submit and it will ask you to confirm a couple things. Don’t worry it’s not going to erase your work once you are done. It will keep all the info you inputted indefinitely. Once you have confirmed, the PDF of the CCV will be available under the history tab.
Really think about what you have done and accomplished. Even if it wasn’t a major chapter of your education, events like conferences, posters, volunteer positions, part-time jobs, etc. all help make your application stronger. A few notes:
  • Publications are the most important. If you have any, put them. If you were the first author or co-author listed second, make sure to indicate that.
  • I would include anything since you started undergrad. There’s no page limit.
  • Quantify as much as possible
    • “organized charity run” —> organized charity race with 100+ runners
    • “awarded local scholarship by my church” —> McLoed Award for Community Service ($1500 CAD)
  • Include posters, presentations at conferences or local events, anything that shows productivity.

Writing the Personal Statement

This is the most personal and creative element of the application, and therefore, there is no A > B > C list for this section. But I will try to give you specific ideas and guidelines to think about as well as some examples.
Here are the objectives of writing a good personal statement:
  1. Establish credibility as a researcher
  2. Demonstrate the alignment of your career goals with the objectives of the government
  3. show them you know how to write
  4. That’s really it.
Okay, so we have our three goals. I would spend about half of it writing about credibility and half talking about your career goals.
Establishing Credibility With Past Experiences
I start my personal statement with something like this:
My academic career has been enriched by a series of research opportunities and memberships in multiple extracurricular groups and organizations. These have provided me with several skills that I will continue to apply throughout my time in graduate studies.
Then, I repeat the following format until I’m out of things to say:
  1. During X period, I was doing Y under Dr. so and so.
  2. What you studied or developed. It hardly matters what subject, as long as you can communicate the essence of the project concisely (1-2 sentences). For example, I still listed my first research position even though it was in Astronomy despite being in the life sciences now.
  3. What skills you learned. It is more important to communicate the transferable skills that you learned than it is what you actually studied. Because the specificity is what signals you actually learned something, avoid generic claims like “practiced analysis” or anything of that vein. Ideally you can identify specific techniques relevant to your proposed project such as Python analysis, cell culture, and MRI segmentation. Some projects may have fewer specific skills, and that’s where I would bring in general research skills like data curation, literature review, manuscript preparation to bolster them further.
  4. How this fits into the narrative of your career goals. Don’t worry if you don’t have a narrative yet! This section should not be written from start to finish, it involves returning to each of these paragraphs and iterating. Come back and finish this part at the end.
“During my third summer and fourth year of undergraduate training, I continued researching under Dr. Thiessen for a thesis project. I studied quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) techniques, specifically, I developed a novel approach to combine diffusion tensor imaging and myelin water imaging acquisitions to estimate biophysical properties of myelin. This work helped me to hone several of the skills I had begun learning in previous projects such as bash scripting, software implementation, and literature review. It also forced me to learn many new image processing skills and to find a way to validate my novel method when no gold standard was available. I further refined my academic skills while writing my thesis and presenting the findings in various formats. One primary example was writing an abstract for a local conference, which awarded me the opportunity to present one of six featured undergraduate talks (~10 mins). In retrospect, this research was also a main driver of a desire to apply my developing skills to understand the human brain and translational neurosciences.”
Defining your career narrative
If you are a great writer, and can come up with a creative and compelling narrative, please ignore my template-like thinking. But I hope that this framework helps anyone who felt a little lost.
Now, I am a grad student, and I have spoken to plenty of grad students. So I know many of you will not have a concrete plan A, B, and C, lined up. And that’s okay. But you need a story with a narrative that contains:
  • A paragraph about how grad school in your proposed lab is a natural progression from your past experiences. (even if you are pivoting fields, that’s just part of the story).
    • A statement about how you chose to do grad school.
      • “My undergraduate research helped me to realize that I love the open-ended problem solving environment of research, which led me to apply for further graduate training.”
    • Justification: why this school, why this lab, why this supervisor. The more the story makes sense, the more likely to succeed you will appear.
      • “I decided to study at the University of Toronto, because I wanted to pursue research at the highest level.”
      • “Through my progress toward my MSc, I have developed a trust and relationship with my supervisor that allows me to pursue my ideas in a way that “
  • Multiple paragraphs (space permitting) how grad school has helped and/or will help move you toward your future goals — even if you didn’t know your goal when starting your program.
    • Now you can talk about the skills your past has given you that will make this likely to succeed
      • Toward my MSc, I have already developed X, Y, and Z, during my publication of the manuscript (Sugden, 2023 medArxiv).
      • This provides me the central skillset needed for my proposed project ______.
    • Skill one (create a public research tool), and why I find it exciting:
      • “I want to learn from [my supervisor’s past project] and build off my existing coding abilities to create my own publicly available research tool for EEG wearables data collection.”
      • “This would significantly lower the barriers to entry for anyone wishing to perform neuroscience research, allowing for any hobbyist, student, or scientist to begin conducting tests and gathering data for less than $1000. This could stimulate more neuroscience/neuropathology research and provide more opportunities especially in smaller labs or in regions with less funding.”
    • Skill two (develop machine learning skills), and why that’s exciting:
      • “The second skill I wish to improve at the Diamandis lab is machine learning.”
      • “One of the other teams within our lab studies artificial intelligence and automated diagnosis of brain tumours using histopathology slides. Being able to use this team as a soundboard will allow me to benefit from their expertise in machine learning and brain tumour pathology.”
      • “The main reason I am passionate about this project is that if I am successful in identifying remote EEG biomarkers, this could have massive implications for how neurological disease is diagnosed and monitored. In the short term, this would prompt larger-scale research to validate my findings as well as initiate the search for remote biomarkers of other neurological diseases.”
  • A mission statement. Who are they investing in? It should be obvious to the review committee why the scientific community and Canadian government should support you.
    • “While it is still far in the future, after my PhD, I hope to become an independent researcher studying biomedical devices such as remote wearables (should they continue to show promise). Ultimately, my goal is to develop and translate a technology that is scalable and has the potential to help large populations with compromised access to healthcare. That’s why I find wearables exciting; if found to be effective, they can be rapidly deployed anywhere at a low cost. These technologies could have even more impact in underprivileged and remote areas where access to neuroimaging is currently rare or impossible.”
    • Even if you are considering leaving Canada after graduate training, I would focus on plans that involve you staying local.
Each of these points should be expanded on, to the extent you have space. Don’t let any single paragraph get too big. For reference, my longest paragraph was 13 lines.

Writing the Project Proposal

The project proposal is the hardest part of the application. The goal of this document is to convince the committee that 1) your project is going to work and 2) you can write scientifically. Of course, if you are already a grad student, then you need to write about your current project. If you are applying in advance, you may not have a supervisor let alone a project. In this case, you can pick a tentative supervisor and come up with something with them, or pick the supervisor/project combination that you are most familiar with, and write as though you were going to do that research, even if it’s at a different university from your #1 choice. My CGSD proposal was for a project I would complete at UWO even though I wanted to go to UofT.
Usually, the page count is pretty brief (1-2 pages) so you will need to be concise. Make sure you understand how the references fit into the page allotment. For CIHR, there was only one page allowed so having only two short-form references as footnotes in a small font was acceptable. If there was a whole page dedicated to it like OGS, then you can have a proper reference section.
I was advised by a professor of mine during my undergrad at UWO and he said in all of his time on the evaluation committee there, all winners had the following sections:
  • Background
  • hypothesis (optional, contingent on whether your project is scientific or engineering)
  • objectives
  • research plan/methods
  • significance/expected contributions
I suspect that you need no help deciding which content goes in each section. So instead of belabouring that, I will provide some traps to watch out for.
Nobody Knows What You’re Talking About
Usually only a couple of evaluators actually read your proposal, and so there’s no guarantee that their expertise will match up with yours. So it’s best to assume the person is a generalist. That means your background should define everything. First introduce the medical condition, scientific domain, or problem you are helping to solve. Second, introduce the technology or method you plan to use. Third explain why the literature has built up to this moment and then finish off with what is not yet understood that you’re going to explore.
The Subtle Art of Objectives
For starters, you need three AIMS. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Master’s or PhD — you want three. Sometimes you can get away with two if they’re substantial, but you’ll have to make that decision with your supervisor.
Objectives need to follow a logical progression, but you don’t want to make it sound like if any one piece doesn’t work, the whole project shuts down. AIM1: should give the impression that with the overwhelming evidence and progress so far, it’s shooting fish in a barrel — ideally it’s almost done. A secure AIM1 helps prevent total disasters where students can’t graduate, so you can’t let the reader get a whiff of uncertainty this early in the proposal. If you must, re-assort your aims so that AIM1 is highly de-risked. AIM 2: should have some sort of proof-of-concept even if it’s drawn from the literature. AIM 3: this is where you can be a little bit speculative with a more ambitious goal, that if successful would actually be a big win for science! They understand if you get this far and something doesn’t work you will pivot and figure out how to graduate.
A Coherent Research Plan
This section will be the most technical, and by extension, is probably the most difficult to communicate clearly. I have some specific info I think you should include, but also some generic advice to keep in mind.
Specific to-do list:
  • DO Include preliminary results. This is my first point, because it’s the most important. Don’t tell them it will work — show them it’s already started to. If you (or the lab you are applying to) have preliminary results, this progress will significantly de-risk the project to the skeptical evaluation committee. If you have the ability to list results with multiple approaches, it can show that you are thinking about the problem in a sophisticated way. For example “the classifier easily distinguished the two groups (population accuracy: 88%, individual accuracy: 91%).”
  • DO Be quantitative when possible. If you have some results to show, put a p-value, an accuracy or whatever you can to show that you are carefully considering your results. Explaining the stats is unnecessary given the length of the document, I would just put the results.
  • DO Use specific technique names, because they communicate that you have an actual plan — but give the generic name for them. For example, there are countless variations of the UNet architecture for every task under the sun. I would just state a “UNet-based architecture”.
A few generic tips:
  1. “Omit Needless Words”. - William Strunk Jr.
  2. They aren’t funding your lab, they’re funding YOU. So refer to yourself in the singular first person. Use “I”, instead of “we have” or we will”.
  3. Balance the use of the active and passive voices. This refers to whether your sentence focuses on the subject performing the action, or on the object receiving the action. Here’s a great resource to dive more into detail:
    1. https://www.cwauthors.com/article/academic-writing-tips-how-to-use-active-and-passive-voice
  4. Ever heard that good writing should flow well? I think this somewhat cryptic advice is highly relevant because of the density of ideas in a 1-page project proposal. Simply put, writing flows well when it is structured so that the reader does not have to change what they are thinking about between sentences. i.e. What they are thinking about at the end of a sentence is the context to start the next sentence.
    1. This can help you in choosing between active vs passive voice.
    2. The cells were treated with a reagent with a concentration of 0.1M. The culture was then monitored for ten days.
      ​The need to backtrack to retrieve the subject is demanding for the reader.

    3. A 0.1M reagent was administered to the cells. They were then monitored for ten days.
      The seamless transition of subject is easy on the reader, allowing them to focus on the story of your proposal.

    4. The use of the passive voice in line C puts the cells as the object, at the end of the sentence. Perfectly priming them to be the subject for the next sentence because the reader is already thinking about them!
The significance/contributions
You’ve done the hard part: convince them you are a competent researcher and academic writer. The only item left is to convince them that the work you are doing will lead to a tangible output. Be brief: three sentences max. It’s okay if this section is a little less stylistic and reads more like a list. But if you can somehow link them together to flow well — you’re a superstar.
“This research is expected to lead to the development of methods and the first proof-of-concept for using wearables to remotely collect real-world EEG data for identifying biomarkers. These methods and analyses will contribute to the nascent body of research surrounding the biomedical potential of EEG wearables and would be adaptable to different pathologies and hardware systems. I will also publish a longitudinal wearable EEG dataset from patients which may be the first of its kind.”
For my project, I am developing an open-source software which in some ways is an easy thing to give as a deliverable. For other projects, the deliverable could be sought-after information in which case you could refer to the section as contributions.
Finally, list any public contributions like datasets that are not obvious (publishing a manuscript would usually be obvious).

Conclusion

As a grad student myself, I know the pain you are going through trying to balance your project, with applications, perhaps even with courses or being a TA. I remember looking for resources when I was applying for scholarships and couldn’t really find anything of substance. Scholarship applications can induce a lot of cognitive dissonance and confusion, so just remember to reference the agency website as often as possible. This article is what I wish I had when I was applying so I hope you find it useful too! 
A big thanks to my friends and colleagues who helped me write and revise this article. If you found it helpful please share it with your grad school friends or on LinkedIn/Twitter. Thanks for reading and best of luck on your applications!
]]><![CDATA[Decoding: The crux move]]>Sun, 09 Jun 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://ricksugden.weebly.com/blog/decoding-the-crux-move​As a young chess player studying under Grandmaster Yan Teplitsky, one lesson that sticks out in my memory is that great players don’t just focus on how to make the best move, but also when to make the best move. I.e. there is a crucial moment in each game, long before checkmate, where the winner and loser are decided. It’s crucial to recognize this moment so you can slow down and invest the time to be precise. I refer to this phenomenon as the Crux Move: a crucial moment in a series of decisions or actions where the accuracy of your move will disproportionately affect the final outcome. In essence, it's the subset of decisions that convert hard problems into easy ones. 
This blog post is about the nature of Crux Moves, provides common examples, and discusses their relevance not only in games, but in various problem-solving contexts, including surgery, rock climbing, and even relationships.

Part 1: Defining the Crux Move

I originally came across the Crux Move from a book on problem solving — which I have unfortunately long forgot the title and author of. It poses the following famous challenge: connect these nine dots by drawing four straight continuous lines.
If you’ve never encountered this problem, go ahead, give it a try. I will disclose the answer below.
Picture
After a few tries, it quickly becomes evident that simply drawing lines between dots will never solve the problem. Until, either through creativity or perhaps even a mistake, leads you to draw outside the confines of the nine dots. Here’s the solution.
Picture
The decision to draw a line that passes beyond the dots is what the author referred to as the "crux move”. Their definition of crux move was the decision beyond which solving the problem becomes easy. I am going to propose my own, slightly modified definition.
Crux Move: a crucial moment in a series of decisions or actions where the accuracy of your move will disproportionately affect the final outcome.
Examples of other Crux Moves
I decided to make this change because besides games chess and connecting dots, this phenomenon is present in many disciplines. For example, research has shown that as surgeons become more experienced, they transition from equally distributing their time between moves to move quickly through the majority and spending a lot more time on a single Crux Move, that is more likely to determine the outcome for the patient. The research even showed that veteran surgeons who have different philosophies or approaches to a certain surgical objective, will converge on the same bottleneck in the solution where they will slow down and invest more time and focus to get it right.
When I googled the term Crux Move, it turns out it’s actually a common term used in rock climbing and bouldering, where it refers to the hardest point in a course or route. In this case, it is the limiting factor in determining what skill level is required to complete the course.
​

Part 2: Understanding the Crux Move

While all these contexts offered slightly different definitions and perspectives, I felt there was a unifying connection and wanted to tie them together. In this process I made the following observations.
  1. The Crux move is only relevant when the challenge is proportional to the skillset. If someone is a terrible rock climber, then it actually doesn’t matter what a professional might consider to be the Crux move — perhaps they will fall on the first boulder.
  2. A Crux Move has to be detectable before it happens, after all, the chess player’s goal is to identify it before investing the time.
  3. In some cases, the Crux Move is make or break (e.g. surgery, or rock climbing), in others, like chess, it can potentially be recovered.
  4. Even with the knowledge that a Crux move will occur in a game or series of decisions, it is not obvious when it is happening.
This has led me to believe there are actually two sub-types of Crux Moves.
Type I: an incorrect move which leads to immediate and obvious issues. E.g. the surgeon knows if the Crux move was botched, the patient may be going critical, or a rock climber may fall instantly.
Type II: a more subtle error that is only later discovered by running into insurmountable obstacles. e.g. after a Crux move in chess, the player with the advantage will slowly creep onward gradually compounding their advantage. In this case, the opponent may review the game and not even know where they went wrong.
I think this distinction is crucial. Type I are mundane; most journeys have a particular challenge where you are likely to fail. More interesting is the insidious Type II, where back-breaking stakes are combined with the deceptively trivial appearance.
​

Part 3: Making Crux Moves

Now that I have defined the notion of a Crux move, and I have provided examples of where I see it, and even a model of different sub-types, I want to discuss some places where I think each of these is relevant to our everyday lives.
  1. Choosing meaningful work
    I obsess over choosing what to work on. It is my personal belief that it’s far more important to work on the right problems than to work overtime. While some may say my fixation on this problem is excessive, I stand by the claim that choosing work is a Crux Move, and should be considered very carefully.
    My framework for thinking about this Crux Move relies on one of my favourite books So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport (see my summary here). The TLDR is that having rare and valuable skills gives you the leverage to exchange them for the triad of ideal jobs (autonomy, creativity, and positive impact) which research indicates is the source of career satisfaction. Having the triad, as well as being valuable to your employer, will prime you to have the passion and dedication to do great work. This creates a feedback loop where you become more valuable, which in turn gives more freedom (if you avoid the traps outlined in the book) and ultimately makes it easy to love your job. Conversely, if you end up in a tyrannical, mundane, or aimless job, you are doomed to suffer.
    This decision is clearly a Crux Move. Positioned well, it gets easier over time to love your job and find fulfillment and positioned wrongly, you could potentially fight a 30 year uphill battle.
    This isn’t narrowly referring to your job title either; it can also refer to how you frame your challenges. For example, if your job as a teacher is to please your principal and school board, that’s a tyrannical job. If instead, your goal is to insert your own interests and passion into your teaching, that’s a colourful and tasteful pursuit that will impact hundreds of students over your career.
  2. Engineering your environment
    For whatever your desired outcome is, it’s much easier to engineer your environment to induce the behaviour you want, than it is to change yourself to overcome the surroundings.
    Examples:
    • it’s easier to diet by controlling your grocery purchases, than resisting a cookie jar.
    • A bag of flossers on your night table is a better cue than trying to remember every day.
    • A primed work environment is better than the intent to focus.
    • Spending time with friends who promote the kind of person you want to be is better than trying to be a black sheep in a friend group you’re used to but not aligned with.
    There are surely countless more, but I think this is extremely relevant to across all dimensions of self-improvement.
  3. Communication in Relationships
    I wanted to end this blog with a personal example. I recently had a conflict with my partner where she was travelling for a couple weeks, while I was going through a particularly stressful and isolating period.
    Before she left, we had scheduled out a month leading up to a day of two final exams on April 4th. Given I have a full-time lab commitment, ongoing projects, and applications — this meant that the whole week preceding the exam was going to be hell-week, ending on April 3rd as a doomsday. There’s never enough time and so even with hard-core scheduling, I ended up pulling a dawn-to-dusk workday with only a total of 120 minutes carved out to eat my three meals. I decided to divide my lunch break in two and use half of it to run on the treadmill and call my girlfriend to talk after days of being isolated while working at my desk.
    I sent her my schedule for the day and when I got to the treadmill I gave her a call. Unfortunately for me, she had plans at that time and so I wasn’t going to get to connect with her. I hung up frustrated.
    Later, we continued sparse communication over text since the rest of my day scheduled out. And by the end of the day, miscommunications had compounded, and I ended up feeling really hurt.
    As part of my journey through grief and mental health, I have been seeing a wonderful therapist, Lori, through the U of T student support (for free by the way, if any other U of T students are reading this).
    When I was explaining this whole situation back to her trying to get some clarity on my own emotions and how things got so out of hand, she identified something that moment on the treadmill as a crucial moment.
    “Rick, you failed to identify and communicate the significance of that moment on the treadmill, and given the context your partner was in, it wasn’t obvious to her. This marks an inflection point which led to a lot of frustration on your end.”
    Sound familiar?
    I think that in interpersonal conflict, there are often Type II Crux Moves that may go unnoticed. In this case, I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts and feelings that I didn’t mark the importance of the moment, and plant a flag to communicate that significance.
    Had I done a better job: “I know you were looking forward to your plans, but I am struggling and I need you right now, can you please find a way to talk?” Obviously, any reasonable partner would do what they can to make that happen, and I think the rest of the story would have been drastically different.
​

Conclusion

Crux Moves are everywhere: in your career, relationships, habits and everyday problems. Their implications are compounding and their effects are significant. When faced with one, I will ask myself "instead of making this decision, how can I invest in this decision?" Thinking about Crux Moves also works in the negative case too. If you are over-optimizing a solution, ask yourself if it's a Crux Move. If it's not, as my friend Arth puts it, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze. 
Thank you for reading! This essay is part of my 2024 series of my blog "Decoding Waves". If you enjoyed it and would like to stay up to date with new posts, I finally figured out how to properly keep a mailing list! (see below) 
]]><![CDATA[Decoding: brainwaves]]>Sun, 07 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://ricksugden.weebly.com/blog/decoding-brainwavesThe downtown is bustling. It's a cityscape, skyscrapers in every direction. You're striding carefree on a busy sidewalk. Everything is a bit blurry: the concrete, the faces, the sounds of cars. You take a look at your watch, and for no particular reason, it doesn’t quite make sense. Worried now, you walk faster, and your gaze traces the surroundings more closely. You let out a sigh of relief -- it isn't real, none of it is.
With recent advances in brain technology you may soon be able to buy devices that let you become aware in your dreams. This blog post discusses this and other fascinating advancements in the neuro-technology pipeline and how I am hoping to be part of it. 


​What are these devices?

So, there are devices that can read your “brainwaves”... But what does that actually mean?

​Well, when your brain wants to do something (e.g. move your hand, or count to ten), it requires communication between a large number of brain cells (like, a lot). This communication is done through small electric pulses, which add together to form measurable voltages, like a tiny short-lived battery. Now, before you run away kicking and screaming because this sounds like a highschool science class, bare with me for just a moment more. This electric activity can be detected without any discomfort or side effects simply by placing a cover with metal sensors onto your head. This is called electroencephalography or EEG for short. 
Picture
Normally, EEG requires a lab with hospital-grade equipment, like the image on the left with wires, but over the last several years, inexpensive ($300) portable versions have been introduced, like the headband on the right. This has opened the door for innovation to bring brain devices into everyday life. 
​

What are they for?

Right now, they are predominantly used for something called neurofeedback: measuring your brain activity and informing you to help guide your mind into whatever state you want (focus, meditation, relaxation etc.). 

In my research, I am trying to use the same $300 devices that are used for meditation, but repurposing them to detect brain tumours. Tumours, especially in the brain, are hard to detect early because it’s expensive to find, and they’re (thankfully) very rare. The result is that people who are diagnosed with them are often fighting very aggressive cancers. 

My vision for the future of this research is that each person’s brain activity could be tracked over time similar to how blood work is done. If some component of the brain activity begins to deviate from their usual recordings, we can use an AI to alert us that there is an anomaly, similar to how credit card companies detect fraud. The patient could then be brought in for further testing to determine if there is a problem, like a tumour. [shameless plug: if you want to be a control for this study, I will gladly enrol you!]

What is the future?

Besides just medicine though, one active form of research is to translate your brainwaves into an image of what you are visualizing. One group has made an AI model, known as Dream Diffusion, that can do this quite well. Here’s an example from their paper: the left column is a real photo the user is looking at, and the other three columns predictions made by an AI that translates their brainwaves to images. 

Picture
Beyond just brain wearables, incredible things are happening in AI more broadly. Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently revealed the next big thing they call Sora – an AI that can generate short videos that look like actual hollywood-level productions (https://openai.com/sora). 

Imagine combining these technologies so that your brainwaves could be rendered into a short film. If this was implemented in a virtual reality headset, it could act as a projector building a 3D virtual world as you imagine it. 

While it’s fascinating to see thoughts projected onto a screen, there is a group who is going one step farther. A startup team known as Prophetic AI has developed a device that will be able to alter your brain activity to give you control over your dreams. This is possible, because their device “The Halo” can simultaneously read and alter brain activity by emitting small vibrations like an ultrasound that can activate your brain. It will wake your brain up, just enough, that you become conscious in your dreams, sometimes referred to as “lucid dreaming”. While this may sound ridiculous, the beta version of the product is supposedly ready. I recently got the news that I have been selected from thousands of applications as one of 50 people who get to try it this summer! I’m stoked to be going to NYC to meet the team at their office and see for myself whether the device works.
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To feed into my own excitement for this invitation, I just re-watched the film Inception, by Christopher Nolan. My imagination ran wild with parallels, envisioning how users of such a device could become dreaming experts, like the dream “architects” in the film. The architects bend reality like a god, folding a landscape on itself like closing a quesadilla (image on the right). If the device does in fact unlock this type of power, I can only imagine the creative adventures and experiences it will create. 

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Imagine if doctors could track your mental health or if a device could let you re-live your favourite memories. With all these futuristic advances, I think there’s a lot of untapped potential, both in the biomedical and consumer spaces. By the end of my PhD project, I am hoping that I will be well-positioned to catch this wave of neurotech, and participating in building the future! Stay tuned for updates about The Halo...
]]><![CDATA[Decoding: The phd paradox]]>Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:13:33 GMThttp://ricksugden.weebly.com/blog/decoding-the-phd-paradoxNow in the third year of my PhD, I have observed a common trend in how students evolve throughout this process. On one hand, as they complete experiments and complex documents, they objectively become more capable problem-solvers. At the same time, something about the kafkaesque nature of academia gradually saps them of their belief that they can effect meaningful change. I call this the PhD Paradox: as one becomes more capable of solving problems, they become more conservative in their thinking. In my eyes, this is a disaster. A PhD is supposed to embolden you to innovate and create the next generation of technology! This blog is about the paradox, my own struggle with it, and how I’m trying to overcome it. 

Part 1: About the PhD paradox

For starters, every doctoral program and student are different, so I can’t speak for everyone. But the students who do follow this pattern fall into two categories:
The first is more blatantly obvious, and can resemble imposter syndrome, or in severe cases, a broken spirit. They are often the result of the classic horror stories of an abusive supervisor or a trainwreck thesis. This person might believe they have not progressed or are still incompetent despite years of hard work. This person might sense that they are too small and can only put a drop in the bucket. 
The second type, the more common, usually does not hold an explicit belief that they have become less optimistic or ambitious. Instead, their actions are subtly changed causing a feedback loop directed towards a more conservative approach. They don’t feel incompetent per se, but this person might sense that the world is too big and too complex to really move the needle. 
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Part 2: My Own ​

As I learned the ropes on campus, I also became more familiar with academia. I settled into a routine, and reclassified from the Master’s to the PhD stream. 

​Once I was committed to the long-haul, I owed it to myself to carefully consider how I want to be positioned when I graduate. I drafted a list of side-projects I could add to my thesis to boost my employability from AI for diagnosis, predicting depression treatment outcomes, to even analyzing brain activity on a microchip. Around the same time, I was brainstorming ways of scaling my tutoring side-gig to supplement the eternally modest PhD stipend. With these in place, I would have both the employability and financial outcomes that I wanted from this degree. 

I started to look for second opinions. I consulted with a range of experts I trust—from scientists to poets—each known for their informed and insightful approaches to problem solving. They converged on the same priorities, leading to the same projects, in mostly the same ordering. With just one more person on my list, it felt redundant to keep going. But if anyone is going to bring a new perspective, it’s Arth.
This guy is a rarity. Versed in millennia of philosophy, and a wealth of knowledge in social psychology. He’s worked for the biggest names like Facebook and Ford, uncovering what makes customers tick so the company can best serve them. He has a humility, a keen ear, and an authenticity that’s hard to find in the go-go modern world. He not only hears your words, but also the emotions behind them. 
Arth graciously indulged me for a walk to discuss.
We end up seeking refuge in a friendly hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurant somewhere nearby. It’s almost empty except for us and two bowls of steaming udon noodle soup. 
I laid out the decision on the table: the projects, the side-gig, and the various reasons. He took it in with a curious expression. 
He responds: “If you could guarantee that anything you work on would eventually succeed, what would you devote your time to?”
I was completely thrown off. That’s perhaps the exact opposite of the risk-averse thinking common to the academy. 
He followed up with an eye-opening monologue that completely changed my way of thinking:
“I think you are acting out of fear.
You have been in this program for a few years now, so you look around and see that everyone else’s life has ‘started’, but yours hasn’t.
Social media has convinced you that everyone else's financial life makes sense, and yours doesn’t.
This can give you a feeling of anxiety, and gradually, leads to a scarcity mindset. 
The pessimistic decisions you make while in a scarcity mindset are short-sighted because they aim to establish security now. 
Let me promise you something: your time, at your age, is far too valuable to be linearly exchanging it for cash. I know, because I made this mistake in undergrad. 
Invest that energy into yourself and learn hard skills. It’s a slow exponential curve, but the payoff later can be orders of magnitudes higher.”
Arth’s words really struck a chord with me. By holding a mirror to my thinking, I see that I had lost sight of the bigger picture. 

Part 3: The Antidote

Each person may need a tailored strategy, but for myself, I’ve settled on three:  
  1. Ditch the scarcity mindset, bet on yourself. Doing a PhD doesn’t make any sense if you plan to bet against yourself — and that’s what I was doing with the scarcity mindset. Instead, I want to re-establish a focus on optimism and investing my future abilities. Practically speaking, this means “doing the hard thing” and learning the challenging skills I think can enable me to have an impact on the world. I now have a webpage where I upload notes on a paper I’ve mastered every two weeks, so that by the end of my degree, I will have tons of ideas and techniques in my back pocket. 
  2. Treasure your cognitive resources. I deleted youtube and facebook from my phone. This isn’t unique to the PhD. I think these apps 1) naturally create mimetic desires and unproductive comparisons 2) sap attention, leaving less energy for creativity and thinking. One idea I got, ironically from youtube, is that your quality of life will NOT suffer from adjusting the current consumption:creation ratio from 100:0 to 90:10. Hardly any change to inputs, but drastic differences in outputs.
  3. Optimize for the outcome of confidence. Do things that will make you believe in your own ideas. This tends to be developed by making hypotheses and testing them. As your ability of making hypotheses gradually improves, you gain confidence. But perhaps, for me personally, the answer is even simpler: do an internship. Through undergrad, I only had academic jobs, and so although I’ve learned a lot about grants, presentations, papers etc. I have developed a self-perception as an academic. Arth identified that this too, creates an uneasy feeling of the unknown within industry. Specifically, an internship would offer the assurance that I am employable, confirmation that industry is not somehow harder, and the trust in my own quality. This, Arth argues, would allow me to build the confidence in my own ideas. For example, if I ultimately decide I do want to focus on tutoring, it won’t be to make money, but to fundamentally challenge the K-12 system.

Conclusion

I have since taken this to heart. I built a workflow for investing in myself. I have vastly reduced my unintentional consumption in favour of content creation (e.g. this blog!). I’ve also started to plug myself into the industry leads through networking and twitter. After a couple months of having implemented these systems, I feel like I’ve already made lots of progress towards regaining that optimism and the sense that the world is malleable. By the end of my PhD, I hope to have enough rational confidence in my ideas, that it gives me the conviction to actually pursue them. 
All of this is not to say PhDs are good or bad, nor are they the only way to become problem solvers or inventors. In fact, PhD plans tend to be low-risk, with contingencies for everything, to ensure the student graduates on time. These are features, not bugs, of grad school. I think the paradox is just part of the nature of the combination of ambiguity and delayed gratification. I hope this post was an interesting glimpse into early-stage academia, or even helpful if you are a fellow grad student. Thank you for reading, I can’t wait to hear your comments!, let me know if you found this post interesting!
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]]><![CDATA[decoding waves: Changing tides]]>Sun, 28 Jan 2024 18:32:33 GMThttp://ricksugden.weebly.com/blog/decoding-waves-changing-tidesToronto, Canada; winter 2024. The sky is filled with a sprawling grey overcast for a seemingly typical January day. Driving past Nathan Phillips Square, there’s half a dozen flags ripping through the air at full mast. Seeing the flags stand at attention, a rush of anxiety floods through me. I think forward with anxious anticipation and excitement. That wind doesn’t just move flags—it also moves the water. And that means the conditions are finally right: surf’s up in Toronto.
If you were like me, you were probably unaware that surfing was even possible on the great lakes; I later learned that’s because there’s only enough wind during the colder months and hardly anyone witnesses the lake during the cold season. So, to answer a few FAQs I’ve gotten: yes, surfing the lakes is possible, and yes the water is cold, but no it’s not as bad as you’d think—wetsuits really work. After an awesome experience surfing in the Dominican last summer, I went looking for a more sustainable way to learn this sport. Thankfully, I have a friend who happened to be a veteran of cold water surfing. It wasn’t long until we were scouring through facebook groups, and I was buying my first board and wetsuit.
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Three months later, with my final pieces of surfing gear in hand, the weather conditions just right, I was finally ready to paddle out. The next day, my girlfriend and I drive out to the Scarborough bluffs, where there’s a known surfing spot. As we arrive we see another car with a surfboard strapped up top—it’s becoming real. We follow him to the parking lot where there are dozens of cars with boards, some have them stacked like pancakes on their roofs. The surfers have their tailgate setup where they are frantically putting on their wetsuit amid the frigid wind—it’s become very real. The wet suit has a very peculiar fit: it tightly fits from all angles showing a true-to-fit shape. Watching the black-laden figures bravely march their boards into the cold water, I felt like I was watching an alien invasion. I could hardly believe I was about to join them.

I set on foot to survey the water in action. The waves were about three feet tall, and there was a lineup of surfers in the water waiting to catch waves near a point-break. One-by-one they calmly paddle into the wave and go for a short ride. While admiring the display of athleticism, I met a surfing veteran who had been sidelined due to injury. According to him, it was a perfect day to learn. Which dismissed the small chance it would be called off due to rough waves—with this blessing, all systems are go. His only advice: stay in the car, don’t get cold before you go in the water. A sense of calm sets in. I am actually about to get into a freezing lake.

With the car seat forward, I’m contorting and struggling while I equip my wetsuit like a straight jacket, trying to stay warm as per the advice. My friend arrives and equips his own gear. I take my board off my roof, and I’m ready to go. As I walk into the water, it’s surreal—so I just follow the lead. I feel the water starting to enter at my ankles. It’s cold. Very cold. As the water deepens, we hop on our boards and start to paddle through waves.

As we go out deeper and deeper, I’m getting all the safety tricks of the trade. He starts teaching me how to read the waves; it seems I will likely need a lot of practice with that. Once I went back to land to get some wax on my board, I started to get the hang of the paddling. In the end, we paddled out for a few rounds. Unfortunately, according to my friend, the waves were taking too long to break. This means that by the time you can surf them, they are in dangerously shallow water. So while it was not a lesson on catching waves, it was still a load fun getting tossed around in the water. By the end of the lesson, I was shocked that I was somehow warmer than I had started (besides my face, which may have started to ice over). But what everyone had been telling me, that the wetsuit will feel warm like a bath, they weren’t wrong!

Reflection

Upon getting out of the water, my friend immediately wanted to know what I thought. Truthfully, I didn’t have an answer right away. I told him I had fun, but I deferred any detailed comments until now.
I think surfing is a special sport. I can’t yet comment on the skill or focus it engages as an athlete, but I can comment on some of the more obvious elements. It doesn’t just place you in nature, it immerses you in it. You’re subjected not just to its beauty, but also its power. For some people, I’m sure it’s meditative. The idealized serenity of being a speck on an ocean. I haven’t quite gotten there yet, I’m still trying to juggle all the advice in real time. Even so, it’s simply fun! It reminds me of being a kid splashing around in a wave pool with my sister, with a smile plastered on my face, ear-to-ear.

I also think that there is something special about the psychology of surfing in the winter. Something about it sounds wrong. Like it shouldn’t work, or shouldn’t be possible…

But first an aside: this past Christmas eve, I said goodbye to my father as he passed away from Leukemia at the tragically young age of 59. I consider myself immeasurably fortunate to have had my dad as a parent, for the 24 years I had him. As devastated as I was, the extent of my distress was only in proportion to the love and joy he brought to my life. At the funeral, I was speaking to my aunt Lori, who just a couple years ago, suddenly lost her husband, the father of her kids. Tragically, that uncle passed away even younger, in better health, and without warning: he went out for a run and suffered a heart attack.

Aunt Lori came to speak to me, I suspect knowing she was uniquely equipped within my relatives, having just parented her two children through a similar situation. Her point was simple yet insightful: when you lose a parent at a young age, you feel as though a rule has been broken. That sense of there being rules is why it doesn’t always feel real that he’s gone. Like there is a script to life, and this somehow violates it. He was supposed to shake my hand when I finish my PhD, he was supposed to hug me as a newlywed, he was supposed to help me choose my first property, and he was supposed to meet my kids. You feel that, he “shouldn’t” have died—as though there is a should or should not in life. When that parent dies, you disillusioned: there are no rules, and there is no script. But at the same time, this can be oddly liberating. Realizing that there is no script also means you don’t have to live life in any particular way. Like I said, there’s no rules. Life’s precious, and events like this remind you just how short it is. At a young age, you still have a lot of freedom as to deciding how you want to design your life and which rules you actually want to follow. 

I think that cold water surfing perfectly encapsulates this psychology. However improbable or impossible it may sound to everyone else—there are no rules, and there is no script. If you want to surf, technological advancements, like the wetsuit, allow you to bend reality to your will. If you want to live in the mountains to explore them by foot, there's nothing actually stopping you. After surfing, I felt that liberation, like I just did the impossible. So, as I transition out of the acute phases of grief into long-term reflection, I think I’m going to keep surfing Toronto. I’ll catch my own waves, and write my own script.
]]><![CDATA[trip to a martian island]]>Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:38:46 GMThttp://ricksugden.weebly.com/blog/trip-to-a-martian-islandOur vessel touched down at 0900 hour. We step out into the open space, looking out, the sky is empty. We see the other vessels side by side in a formation not too far from our landing. Most of planet earth has either a brown or a beige hue, depending on whether it is soil or sand that collects in the cracks and lines found everywhere. The landscape feels familiar, but this place is different. Instead of brown, everything is tinted red. The soil and the sand, are red. In the water there are strange seemingly alien creatures: red shells, disproportionate claws, and long protrusions from their face. They are the locals' food. We have arrived in perfect timing: the end of Prince Edward Island -- lobster season!
As a Canadian who has only really been to one other province, one of my recent interests for travelling is to see more of my supposedly very beautiful country. Tired of the hustle and bustle of the metropolitan lifestyle, I looked for a change of pace. Nowhere would the pace be more changed than Canada's smallest, cutest, and nicest province: Prince Edward Island. In a small town where everything is so different, I had the time and the space to reflect on lifestyle.

My girlfriend has family in PEI which made the whole trip work seamlessly and let us hit the ground running. Within hours of arriving I got to try my first lobster roll. I'm not one to post food pics but I tried a different lobster roll each day I was there. They were definitely a big part of my trip.
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We then went to look for nice shells on a red sand beach, and took a drive through the countryside. The pace of the island was exactly what I was hoping for. It was really nice. I slept probably ten hours a night, no cars driving by, no construction, the air was fresh ocean air. Nothing to worry about for tomorrow.​

​One thing I want to continue incorporating to my travel is meeting people through my martial art BJJ. One of the great things about the sport is how friendly the community is and that a dojo/training centre doesn't have as much continuity as a martial art like Karate. This makes it super easy for someone to drop into a new dojo and have fun right away. Charlottetown BJJ was probably the nicest facility I have trained in filled with super friendly folks. When I go back to PEI, I will definitely be planning another training session.  
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Of course, we visited Cows ice cream on the daily...
On our last day, we set an alarm to wake up for our flight. But due to staff shortages, our flight actually got cancelled! A real blessing in disguise: stuck in PEI one extra day.

We started our day off slow with our usual tea and coffee. But quickly seized the opportunity to see some relatives we hadn't got the chance to visit. As a group, we went to the scarecrow festival, a street festival for farmers and related businesses. It was like any other farmer's market, except it was the best one I've ever been to. 
For some reason, the prices on everything were either very reasonable, or a small donation to a worthy cause. Free milk truck, free Sobeys food, freezies with optional donation to animal shelter. $3 for a litre of apple cider made yesterday. We also got offered a bonus free sandwich by a Sobey's guy if we ate it on camera. 

A two dollar donation to violence prevention got us some PEI fries and picture with this little guy!

Reflection Time

One of my main observations on this trip was that everyone was happy there. The reflection I was engaging with was what does it take to be happy? Could I be happy with much simpler surroundings? Or does the city provide me with something necessary?

I'm sure the common answer is it depends on your goals: grow a career in the city and retire in the country. Seems ordinary enough. But what about people who manage to bring the cool features of the city to the community of the small-town. 

To be honest, I think it reminded me of how I like the small town-vibe of my hometown in Markham. I think for me, I need to find a way back to that feeling, and find it before retirement. Too much of life is before retirement to compromise on lifestyle like that. I hope I can find a remote job that allows me to leave the city without spending hours commuting each day. 
Nothing ground breaking, of course. But it was the perfect little reminder of the life that goes on outside of the city. I had a great time in PEI, and hopefully next time I can visit during the surfing season and catch some waves! 
]]><![CDATA[Surfing in the Dominican Republic: A Lesson in Waves and Chaos]]>Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:53:58 GMThttp://ricksugden.weebly.com/blog/a-chaotic-introduction-to-surfingThe ship was leaving in three hours. I was about a one-hour drive from the port, on a remote beach in the Dominican Republic. The scene was perfect: wind was blowing the palm trees, the beautiful sunny day poking through the canopy as the leaves rustled, and the waves were majestically thrashing about in the water. In contrast, our group of three was mayhem: one had fallen in the waves and her foot was probably broken; the other was in the middle of a full-blown panic attack about missing the boat. Hardly anyone, not even my taxi driver speaks english. Yet somehow, even despite the sea urchin spine in my finger, I couldn't help but feel an amazing sense of peace and cool after my first real attempt at surfing. 
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​I had tried surfing once as a 12-year old boy in Maui, but I didn't have too much success nor really know what I was doing. But this time in the DR, I came ready. I had watched the youtube lectures, I had practiced the movements, and I had done the warmup stretches. I was ready. And much to my surprise, some element of my preparation must have been helpful. On my very first wave I stood up, and rode it all the way back to the beach. All in all, I caught almost every single wave during my 90 minute lesson, wiping out only about two times. I could hardly believe the success I was having.

Don't get me wrong, it was definitely challenging; we were riding green waves, not white water. People were wiping out all around me. But I was 100% dialed into my surroundings. The surf was the only thing on my mind. There was no beach, no home, no responsibilities, no reality. The focus felt good, like a meditative flow state. I was hooked. 
We ended up making it back on time to our boat with a trifecta of a limp, a stinging hand, and a broken spirit. I think I got my first lesson in surfing in two ways. The first was technical, regarding the mechanics of how to stand up. The second was in keeping cool among the "waves" of chaos coming down on us at that remote Dominican beach. I'm sure I'll never forget either lesson. 

Thank you for reading! In my next post I will be discussing the research I put into buying my first surfboard!

Here's a photo of us having survived. If you are ever in need of transport in the DR, I cannot recommend our driver, Roberto, enough. He was the hero of our trip!
 
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