September 2008 Archives

Everytime people ask me "Who is your advisor?", I know I have a tough time to go.
"My advisor is Professor McGill."
"Who?"
"Professor William McGill."
"Oh..Is he in CSE?"
"No, he is IST faculty."
"Oh really? Sorry, his name again?"
"Professor William McGill"
"What's his research area?"
"Damage assessment, risk analysis etc"
"What is damage assessment? "
"Blablablablabla"
"What is risk analysis?"
"Blablablablabla"

This kind of conversation happens almost everyday. Thanks to Professor Tapia that gives me this opportunity to officially introduce my advisor Professor William McGill grandly..

Actually, I came to know IST since my junior year because one of my schoolmates was admitted by IST. At that time, I had a superficial understanding of IST. I thought it i was like those MIS programs which focus more on management and business.
When I began to apply for graduate school, my point of view was completely changed, I started to think IST is equal to computer science departement since there are many professors that are doing technical research. However, these are all superficial understands untill I arrived at IST.

Fortunately, I did not have a advisor before I came to IST. So I have the chance to talk with several professors in IST who are in different areas including HCI, Information Retrival and security. And I met some other professors during orientation and classes. I felt that IST is very diverse, although there is no deparment here, the research areas really went into different  directions. I believe this is the result of not having departments because a flat structure can help people have more interaction and cooperation. I start to love IST. I have mentioned that I am interested in many many areas. I know, as a Ph.D. student, depth of study is more important than broadth. But I am really happy to taste different areas. My advisor and me are working in the area of security, I am taking the course in HCI, and in other courses, I learned about social network, information retrieval, and so forth. Now nobody can say I am a technical guy anymore since I am learning so much things.

Back to the theme. If IST continure to keeping this structure without department, how it should be structured? I think the research tracks for graduate study are very good and flexible. However, for undergrad students, since they do not know what they want, we should have a advisor or tutor program for them. Say, a student can talk with the advisor or tutor once  a week about their study. The advisor and the tutor can tell the student the related topics of any track. Gradully, the student will have feeling in one or more tracks and he/she can become more focus on these areas. During my undergrad study, my college also have a lot of tracks, like enterprise computing, mainfram, embeded system and so forth. However, there was no such advisor or tutor program and I have no idea about these areas. The result is that I took many courses which I was not interested and wasted much time that I could have spent on my interesting areas.

Where do I fit into IST?
Well, I have mentioned that the broadth of research in IST really attracts me. However, among all of these areas, I am interested in security in most. Now I am working with Prof. Mcgill within the area of risk analysis and damage assessment. This is a quite new area and there are not many papers now, which is a great chance for us. What's more, I believe this study is also very useful and highly demanded in China.
In addition to study, in IST there are a lot of Chinese students and we seem to form a network that help each others. This also can help me cure my homesick. =)

All in all, we are Penn State, we are IST!!

Many people ask me this question when I told them I would pursue my graduate study in IST at Penn State. And many people cannot tell the difference between ischool and computer science department. Even last week, one undergrad asked me "why do you study information? Information is always changing and it's meaningless and impossible to study it!!!"

So, back to the theme. What is an information school?
To answer this question, we should first define what is information. Information is based on data but they are not same concept. Data is the collection of observation or experience. It has no meaning without context. However, when we give meanings to data, in other word, put data in a context, it becomes information. For example, given a 10*5 matrix of numbers, people cannot understand what each cell means. But if we know each row is the final scores of one student and each column stands for different courses, then we have the information about the exam results of these ten students.

Generally speaking, Ischool studies information science.

Information science is an interdisciplinary science concerned with the collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information.
Tracing back to the early age of information science, the focus of it is to dealing with the management of libraries and archives. With the development of electronic and automatic devices since 1950's, the subject gradually transit into the modern information science.
Nowadays, information science includes many kinds of topics such as data modeling, groupware, document management, human-computer interaction, information architecture, information systems, knowledge management and so forth. It has been acknowledged as a new subject and many universities have founded their special information school for the research in this area.
As for research, Information science has similar methods to computer sciences and social sciences which including archival research, computational complexity and structure, content analysis, case study, historical method, interviews, life history, longitudinal study, observation and participant observation.

For most ischool that I know, they share some characteristics in common. One point is that they are all doing research in the interdisciplinary areas. They do not barely focus on technical, pschological or some other particular subjects. As I have mentioned before, we should provide context to information. In Graph Theory, we have the concept of 'betweeness'. I think the betweeness of ischool is very high since it relates departments that seldom cooperate.
However, every ischool has different taste. For IST at Penn State, it focus more on social informatics. We have quite many sociologial researchers here. My friend studies information science in Arizona, I think ischool there pay more attention to Artificial Intelligence and some related area. They have very strong faculty doing research of AI. For ischool at CMU, I found it is more related to management and business. They have mroe research in e-commerce, information management, and enterprise informatics. What's more, their master program in management information system is a very good professional program that can help students secure a good job after graduation.

Ok, back to the reason why I come to IST at Penn State.
From my undergraduate study, which is in Software Engineering, I found that I can do technical stuff well, like programming. But I am more interested in the interdisiplinary area of technology and other subjects. I like to think and analyze problems. Such as how can we design a better user interface? How people interact with machines? How can we assess the value of our information asset? These questions seem very attractive for me. Then I realized, I need a degree from ishool but not computer science.
Second reason is that the research in IST is very diverse. Therer are many areas in IST that I am very interested in when I was browsing the information of IST. Including security informatics(Dr.Chu, Dr. Liu, Dr. Squicciarini, Dr. Mcgill), HCI(Dr.Carroll, Dr.Rosson) and web search(Dr. Jansen and Dr. Giles).
Some other reasons that I choose Penn State is that I like the northeastern part of the States since there are Boston, NYC, DC and Philadaphia here. And my girlfriend is in CMU which is only 3 hours drive from here.
All the reasons together made me here in IST at Penn State. I am very happy that I met many helpful and insightful faculty and many interesting students here. And I do believe I'll enjoy my time here.

From my undergraduate study, I found my strong interest in design and create inoovative things. Although the major job for a software engineer (which is my undergraduate major)  is to programming according to the documents, I always wanna add my thought into the projects. And I have also implemented some projects by my ideas.

What drives me? Of course, my imagination. That's why I gave up several decent offers from leading companies in IT area. I don't want to lose my imagination and become a pure technical guy.

I like to try new things since it can help me to generate more ideas. I am interested in almost everywhere, like astronomy, bio, history. The reason why I choose IST is because IST is a very interdisciplinary program which has collaboration with many other departments and institutions. So my passion drives me here.

In addition, theother thing that exites my passion is sports, especially football. Even before my college entrance examination(which is super important in China), I was still watching football games but not preparing for the exam =)

To be frank, as a first-year student who goes to the Ph.D. program directly with a bachelor degree, my academical background is not rich.

In 2004, I was admitted into the software engineering department of Tongji University in Shanghai. It is a very intensive program that cultivates students with both computer science courses and many practical courses. No kidding, our courses are twice as much as the courses in the CS department in Tongji. In my first 2.5 years in university, the courses start from 8am to 9pm almost everyday. In the evening, we should still work on different kinds of projects untill 2~3am next morning.

Unbelievable? Yes, we are the busiest undergrad students in Tongji, but as well, the placement of us is the best. The tough life has laid us a very solid technical foundation including C/C++, JAVA, SQL, .Net, J2EE, MFC, Mainframe, ...etc.

In my senior year, I got an chance to be an exchange student in Uppsala University, Sweden. It's very like State College since it's also a university city. I studied Distributed Systems and Software Arichitecture in Java there for three months.

In 2007, I started my internship in the Data Warehouse department in eBay. My major job in ebay is developing Data warehouse ETL applicaton based on Teradata, Appworx and shell programming.

My bachelor thesis is <Analysis of ETL and ELT models in Data Warehousing>. It is originated from my internship.

My background is very technical, there is not too much research there. But I have implemented many interesting  projects based on my innovative ideas.  I have designed  a pulse diagnosis  learning machine  by using eBox. It can teach people the essence of tradition Chinese medicine -- pulse diagnosis. What's more, I have created a take out search enginee to help people find and order take out.

Right now, I am interested in many areas including HCI, security and web searching.

My name is Miao Jiang. In Chinese order, my name is Jiang Miao.(姜淼) Yes. I am from Shanghai, China. My given name -- Miao, means peaceful and wide ocean. There are two reasons that I was given this name. First, because both my parents' names have the word "sea". So sea + sea = ocean. Second, they wanna me to be a broad-minded person like the ocean.

I was born in Aug 27th, 1986, which was an unusual cold morning in summer. In Chinese Zodiac, I am 'tiger'. Some people told me that 'tigers' born in the morning will have a rich and happy life. I don't know whether it is ture since I am still not rich =). But I am really happy in my first 22 years since my parants love me very much. And I love them too.

I spent most of my 22 years in Shanghai. Although I always complain that there is not any place in Shanghai can attract me, indeed I like the city and culture there very much, as well as the Shanghai dialect(which is completely different to Mandarin). 

I am an optimistic, humorous, self-motivating guy. I know sometimes I dont talk too much(I mean in USA), that's because I still need time to bring up my English in order to talk as the way I do in China.

For my weakness, I am a careless person. And I dont know why, I had very good memory when I was little, but now, it seems my memory has degraded and I always forget to do things.

I like watching all kinds of sports. Especially football, basketball and F1. I play football and basketball. When I was in middle school, high school and first 3 years in university, I almost played everyday. But since my senior year, I became more and more busy and I do not play often now. I also like watching movies and travellng. I have been to many places in China and Europe. And now Iam planning my trip around the States.