[m] became a Ph.D. candidate

I proposed and defended my dissertation topic towards Ph.D. degree on Friday, December 16th. According to UIC regulations, I became a Ph.D. candidate and finished the second milestone towards degree completion (the first one was the Qualification Exam).

The dissertation topic, called Personal Augmented Computing Environment (PACE), was based on my long-time thoughts about how the advances in mobile computing and grid computing could benefit individual users. Having been a mobile handset developer for one year and a research assistant with EVL for three years, my past experience backed me up perfectly in conducting a research project as proposed. Particularly I am interested in three aspects of PACE: 1) effective clustering and utilization of mobile device resources, 2) scalable multi-modal human-computer interaction and 3) context-aware methods and models.

[updated on June 22, 2006] One keynote on this year's WWW conference specifically addressed personalized web search in mobile environment, which was very close to the paradigm of PACE. As I will start my internship at Motorola Lab from August, I feel quite motivated in exploring the "Seamless Mobility" concept heavily prompted by Motorola.

[d] Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Yesterday Chicago had its biggest snow blast this winter. Although I had to leap among snow piles on the streets and spend half hour to dig the old Camry out, the feeling of holiday season was sweet and warm. Next Friday will be the prelim exam date and I expect it to go through smoothly. This year had been a hard time for me (I even did not have time and mood for the Thansgiving turkey). However, it is good to see things changing gradually and positively.

On X'mas day, I will be flying home. How I missed my parents, the view of Jingpin Hill from the window of my bedroom, and the delicious meat buns served with hot soup! No place is better than home. That is so true. So let me turn the radio louder and sing along with the music: "let it snow, let it snow, let it snow......".