Thread by @2plus2make5

Many people are discussing how Turing Award winner Jeff Ullman used to have a webpage making offensive comments about Iranians and Native Americans, but no longer does. I want to give a shoutout to a person who played a small role in getting the page taken down, @PangWeiKoh. 1/

Ullman's website had been causing problems for years when Pang Wei sent a series of polite and well-argued emails to the department asking whether it might be taken down. A few weeks later the website disappeared. 2/

Many other good-hearted people contributed to this as well, of course, but I don't want to name them without their permission (please do tag them if they want to be named or let me know and I will). Still, Pang Wei played a small but important role. 3/

I mention this story because it illustrates the quality I most respect about Pang Wei. It's not that he's brilliant, although he is. It's that, to a greater degree than most of us, when he decides something is the right thing to do he'll do it, even if no one else wants to. 4/

A lot of people - me included - make a lot of noise virtue signalling. Pang Wei doesn't do that. He just reaches a conclusion about the correct thing to do, and then he does it with terrifying efficiency. 5/

One other example of this: our recent COVID Nature paper (nature.com/articles/s4158…). This work is led by Serina Chang (@serinachang5). It's impossible to say too many good things about Serina, but I've said them on many occasions, so I want to highlight Pang Wei's role. 6/

He's never even given a talk about it, but his fingerprints are all over this work - in the decades-old optimal transport algorithms applied to a totally novel setting; in the integrals correcting the visit counts; in the winsorization of input data to defend against outliers. 7/

All this was the kind of meticulous, creative data science work which reminds you that #MethodsMatter - the stuff that gets buried in the supplement but differentiates projects that work from those that don't. 8/

Pang Wei got involved in this because he saw the coming crisis and asked me if there was anything he could do to be helpful. 9/

I'll close by mentioning my conflict of interest: Pang Wei will be on the job market next year and I want an American institution to hire him because it'll be a lot more annoying to collaborate with him if he goes back to Singapore. Please hire him. Thank you.