DHI Seed Project 2025/26
A Hyperlinked Edition of the Huainanzi
Learning and Growth Through the Project
by Oak Soe OO
Year 1, BEng in Computer Engineering
For most of my 2026 Spring and Summer Semesters, I worked on the DHI Seed Project – Huainanzi, which was a noteworthy experience in my first year at HKUST. This was my first time working on an official project, and the experience was overwhelmingly positive.
It was very interesting to learn about the structure and context of ancient Chinese texts; the authors’ viewpoints; how they are interpreted; and the issues that arise from the structures that make up these texts.
The course of the project was flexible, and we would hold meetings to brainstorm ideas that would improve and determine the course of our project. It was a great experience to have your ideas and thoughts as a first-year student be taken into consideration and implemented on a formal project.
What made this project even more fulfilling was that I was able to learn to view problems from a user’s perspective and think about the consequences of how much the design of a product has on the final user’s experience.
Over the course of the project, I utilised my skills in software engineering and web development to implement an intuitive MVP (minimum viable product) of a web app that would illustrate how closely intertwined ancient Chinese texts were.
My primary responsibility in the project was to be a fullstack software developer and an engineer. I would take the data provided and link it through features we developed to identify how closely connected all these massive amounts of data were.
My WORK
One of the biggest highlights of the experience was coming up with a proposal on integrating AI and NLP models within the project to automate discovering non-obvious parallels, which would take a considerable effort and time if done by hand.
However, my main work was developing and implementing the web app that helps visualize how all the ancient Chinese texts are interconnected with each other.
I implemented a plethora of features from the search bar, annotation feature, and import and export feature. Working on this project was a lot of fun and interesting.
What made this project deeply rewarding was the fact that I was working on something that directly solves the problems that my PI and other researchers were facing at this current moment. Through this project, I was also able to learn how to coordinate within a group of fellow students as well as with the professor managing our project.
