Greetings!

I'm currently a Ph.D. candidate at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. Prior to that, I have graduated with B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Diverse, dynamic, and full of challenging opportunities, Shanghai remains one of my "big-city-haunts" around the globe.

I spent quite a few years living with my parents in Guangzhou, the "Pearl City" in southern China a short drive from Hong Kong. As the famous Chinese saying goes, "Dining in Guangzhou", the city is famed for its fantastic variety of the very best Chinese cuisine, most notably, seafood and dim sum (which is actually a Cantonese term). My mother tongue is Cantonese, but my father often speaks Mandarin, so I've ended up speaking both of them quite well.

Besides calling me Ziming, you can also call me Rick which has been my English name since high-school; I took this name because it's the name of my favorite DJ at that time. My Chinese name is written as.

In my spare time, I do a lot of traveling and backpacking. Not really a wanderlust, I just enjoy the experience of exploring a new environment, a new culture, and sometimes an unknown world full of challenges. Since 2005, I've been exploring the 58 national parks in the US, and have made 25 visits to 21 parks so far. My rather ambitious plan is to hopefully visit all the parks one day in the future. Well, I’m sure that would require some significant time, money, and most important, persistence!

Here is my travel log. You can click here to see a geomapping of the places I've been to since 2003.

Although the time pressure being a graduate student can sometime be tremendous, I enjoy reading and good movies. Oh, I love to play my electronic keyboard Yamaha DGX-200, too.