September 2008 Archives

My advisor in IST is Prof. Xiaolong (Luke) Zhang. His name "Xiao Long" in Chinese means "little dragon". Differently from Western countries, dragon in China was a symbol of emperors. We often call our Chinese as "descendants of dragon". So "Xiao Long" and "Long"(dragon) are popular names in China.

We are from the same country - China, and the same undergraduate university - Tsinghua University. However, honestly I have very little information about my advisor's personally life, because we only know each other for less than 2 months. As far as I know, he has a little daughter - He often mentions her but I have not got a chance to see her. Another thing I know is that Xiaolong is a soccer fan - we played together on weekends.

I believe a good personality match between advisor and student is quite important for graduate studies. Xiaolong is a very easygoing man, and always glad to offer help. So far it is a very nice experience working with him.

It was a bit unexpected for me to know my college, our college, the College of Information Science and Technology was created in 1997. It took two years to make the new college open its door and admit the first students for the Fall 1999 semester. Maybe at the point of facing a new century, information technology is so important for people and society. Research should not only focus on developing technology itself, but also take care of changes in our everyday lives following the revolution of information. Penn State realized this. Unlike other iSchools mostly succeed to their library schools, IST is built from white paper. It was a lot of money to found this new school. The construction of an IST building cost $58.8 million dollars to complete. While IST's overall research funding is in excess of $36 million dollars as for 2007.



When applying for Phd program, I was not aware that IST did not have departments in its college - I thought it was an "IST "department". But at the time I actually study here, I notice research area in IST is quite broad. It is very rare that HCI and cyber security researchers belong to a same "department", and do research project together. In my point of view, this kind of parallel structure is very helpful for inter- and multi- disciplinary research work. Although the organizing problem may arise along with its expansion, it is still necessary to keep this broad research surface and to limit restrictions followed by dividing organizations.

I benefit from this flat structure during the time in IST. This let me get in touch with many areas I am interested. My research is mainly on HCI. In IST there is a superb HCI research team. All of professors cooperate frequently, in spite of the "HCI center" is loosely organized. Currently I am working with Dr. Zhang specifically on information visualization. In my first year I may reach as many fields as possible during courses to fix on my best research topic. I have to say IST is providing an appropriate platform for me to achieve this.

An article full of highly praise and admiration to Google's new browser, as well as their company: "a promising, modern, streamlined, nonbloated, very secure alternative to the browsers currently available" ...

I downloaded Chrome and tried for around four minutes. Nothing very much special. Maybe Google fans are happy to see their new product. For common users like me, having another choice perhaps makes simple web surfing unnecessarily complicated. But Firefox is going to meet a big embarrassment, I guess. Comparing to Microsoft, Mozilla maybe feel more challenging, because their users are more likely to accept new things, and concern more about browser's performance than its compatibility. At earlier time, they turned to Firefox from IE. Now similar thing happens. The most unfortunate thing is that, the default search engine of Firefox has always been - Google.

I am pretty sure I visited iSchool's page on Wikipedia before I got here in IST. "Schools of Information or iSchools are emergent academic programs committed to understanding the role of information in human endeavors and nature." It is so abstract a definition. The following explanation is more understandable for me: "The schools conduct research into the fundamental aspects of information and information technologies and into the relationships between people, information, and technology."



I think the most significant difference between iSchools and traditional departments and colleges is their target: iSchools are to study on the "relationships". This goal determined iSchools have to be interdisciplinary. Because when looking at relationship, it can not be just one part. It has to be communication, interaction and integration between multiple vertexes. Here in iSchools three vertexes are people, information and technology. So edges connecting them can be computer science, cognition science, economics, psychology, sociology, even philosophy. This interdisciplinarity is the most important reason that made me choose an iSchool when I was choosing my future graduate study. In such research environment we could see a computer scientist talking to a psychologist, a cognition researcher arguing with sociologist. I believe this kind of integrating can inspire new excellent ideas and thoughts. I am also very likely to study in such a school that can give me multiple points of view from various perspectives.

I am not sure who came first, iSchools or the idea that to study information, technology and people. There are several iSchools now. Most are in North America, founded in around the last two decades in 20th century. They do have some things in common - their names, all have "information". I guess it is because their main research orientations are towards "the fundamental aspects of information and information technologies". Yet they have different flavors. A few of the iSchools are founded separately, while some of them inherited their former school or college of library. Therefore some iSchools research is more focus on library sciences, the organization and dissemination of information resources. Yet there are some other iSchools have more degree of freedom in research areas besides LIS, lying on design, management and HCI etc.

Back to the title, I am now sitting in an iSchool's classroom, which I do not feel surprisingly. Interdisciplinary studying is what I am interested in. My background is purely Electronic Engineering, studying technology, dealing with information, but seldom considering people. Not satisfactory enough. That why I am here.