I’m Wei Ji Leong!

I'm a Malaysian who was brought up in a little country called Brunei. Life in Brunei as a kid was great in the 1990s and 2000s, I went to a Chinese school where everyone learned three languages, and spent time playing out in the neighbourhood and jungle behind my house with friends during late afternoons. Brunei is quite a multicultural society, and while it is predominantly a Muslim country, every culture was respected. I had a best friend who was half Filipino, another who was a Christian, and had no trouble eating food from Indian, Malay, Chinese, or the occasional Japanese restaurant. Sure, there wasn't such a thing as buying alcohol, nor taxes or political parties, but it made for a simple life growing up.

After sixth form, I went to New Zealand (yet another small country) to start my university education. Somehow, I ended up there for nine years, and have practically became a 'Kiwi' too! I fondly remember my first 'ice' related project - automatically mapping the expansion of proglacial lakes in the Southern Alps from 2000-2011 using Landsat 5 and 7. Back then, we called it 'supervised or unsupervised classification', whereas now it would have the fancy label of 'machine learning'.

That GIS/Remote Sensing project was how I got to know Dr. Huw Horgan, a great mentor who supervised both my BSc(Hons) and PhD! My Honours project in 2015 was on using ICESat laser altimetry to map potential subglacial lakes near the Antarctic grounding zone. There I was, finding out how lasers bouncing off the ice sheet could tell us how the ice surface was moving up and down over time! Two years later in 2017, I started my PhD doing some deep learning research into super-resolving the bed of Antarctica, and eventually I got to work on ICESat-2 data (the awesome successor to ICESat), this time using it to map active subglacial lakes for the whole Antarctic continent!

To this day, I still find it crazy that someone growing up in the tropics get to do research about ice. The path has not been straightforward either, I've worked part-time at a restaurant and multiple summer jobs throughout my degree, went off to the GIS industry for two years because I couldn't get a scholarship to do my PhD, and was juggling 3 jobs at one point so that I could cover both my living expenses and my younger sister's tuition fees. Yet even after all this, I still feel very privileged and fortunate, because this is the type of science people in my home country won't even dream of doing. So definitely keep at it, find the right mentor, and work hard for it.

There are some parallels between the scientific 'method' and the Buddha's teachings. We often have to throw away existing knowledge and wisdom, and give up on fixed ideas or preconceived notions, because when we become attached to what we think is right, they become obstacles in our path to seeing that which truly is.

I've been a vegetarian since I was twelve or thirteen. My family are Buddhists, and while I used to go to shrines to recite sutras as a kid, it wasn't until I moved to New Zealand that I learned to understand the concepts behind the words I was chanting. There are some parallels between the scientific 'method' and the Buddha's teachings. We often have to throw away existing knowledge and wisdom, and give up on fixed ideas or preconceived notions, because when we become attached to what we think is right, they become obstacles in our path to seeing that which truly is.

Despite all the work I've done on remote sensing data over Antarctica, I've never actually went there. However, I got really lucky and spent two weeks on the opposite side of the world at McCarthy, Alaska during the Fifth International Summer School in Glaciology. It was my first time to step on a proper glacier, wearing crampons and all! After a day of hiking, you really learn to appreciate the scale of just how much ice the pixels on the computer screen actually represent. The experience from the summer school opened my eyes to the many fields in glaciology, and allowed me to be acquainted with a diverse set of glaciologists from around the world.

It's definitely not something they had anticipated me doing, but my family have been pretty supportive of my research interests on Antarctic remote sensing. Perhaps I've tried once or twice to explain about how the satellite sensors work to measure ice volume change. But they do realize that the ice melting causes sea level rise and that it's important work. Really though, they just get super excited when I send them pictures of falling snow.

I'm really keen to do more innovative work on applying Deep Learning to the Cryosphere. Currently the main project I'm working on isn't polar-related, but I'm sharpening my tools with the latest innovations in the Computer Vision field, and hope to get back into Antarctic research once more. So if you're reading this and have an exciting opportunity (on polar remote sensing + AI), make sure to flick me an email!

I'd like to challenge the community of emerging computational polar scientists to practice doing science in a more open and collaborative manner. Share more, connect with people, and realize that science is more than just a series of experiments.

It's hard to name a single person, but I consider many of the early career researchers (and more senior professors) I interact with on GitHub as my role model. Sometimes it can feel like a scientific career is a competitive world, but it doesn't have to be that way. I'd like to challenge the community of emerging computational polar scientists to practice doing science in a more open and collaborative manner. Share more, connect with people, and realize that science is more than just a series of experiments.