I was born and raised in Medan, Indonesia and migrated to the United States in 1998 to pursue further education. I received my bachelor's degree and my master's degree from the University of Central Florida in 2000 and 2002 and the second master's degree (MBA) from Rollins College in 2011. In 2019, I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Central Florida with the specialization in the Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence. The title of my Ph.D. dissertation was “Context-Centric Affect Recognition from Paralinguistic Features of Speech."
During my spare time, I am conducting some scientific research projects. My long-term goals include: (1) to create both autonomous and virtual intelligent agents that can interact naturally with humans via verbal and non-verbal communication in a variety of socio-emotional context, and (2) to leverage machine learning techniques to approach business questions and opportunities and create predictive models to better forecast customer behavior, company performance and next most likely pathways to optimize conversion and retention. My research therefore lies at the intersection of Affective Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Business Administration, Data Science, and other disciplines providing the socio-emotional contextual information.
With my education background, I am very passionate in bringing out each child's potential. Since every child has different strengths and weaknesses, it's my desire to help each child to overcome their weaknesses and fill in any gaps he/she has.