[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.