Jessica Sharmin Rahman is one of those rare human beings we always hear about who can do it all. She has been taking dance lessons from the age of six and taught classical dance at Chhayanaut Cultural Centre (one most prestigious dance institution of Bangladesh) for almost eight years. But that is not her primary career. She is a young computer science researcher whose work primarily involves looking at the effects of auditory and visual stimuli on human physiological signals to analyze how sensory input influences Human affective (emotional) reasoning.

She is now a PhD Student in the Human-Centred Computing (HCC) group of the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU). Before that, she received her B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Dhaka. Recently she became the people's choice winner of The Three Minute Thesis competition (3MT) hosted by ANU for her presentation titled "Do you know how music makes you feel?".

In this episode of Bangla Tech Talk, we talked about the 3MT competition, her doctoral research, the importance of ethical thinking in computer science research, and the social dilemma both the documentary and issues we face as a society. Later in the episode, Jessica shared why both her dance and research works are equally important to her and how they help each other to be more productive. We also learned about her journey from Bharatanatyam to street dance and a brief history of both dance forms.

An outline of this episode this provided below to help navigate the conversation.

OUTLINE

00:00 - Intro

8:57 -  Three Minute Thesis

15:42 -  How do you summarize a PhD research in three minutes

21:04 - Effects of music on human physiological signals

33:29 - Ethical thinking in research

40:51 - Spotify Music Recommendation

45:35 - The social dilemma

01:07:42 - Start of nontechnical part

01:09:05 - Bharatanatyam To Street Dance

01:55:50 -  Bangladesh (The country and The people)