I enrolled at the Automation Department in University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), which is situated in Hefei, a major city in the heart of East China. During my undergraduate years, I obtained knowledge on Control Theories, Maths and Physics, Circuit, Hardware Architecture and Software Programming.(syllabuses of some of my major courses) Besides course work, I actively took part in all sorts of hands-on extra-curricula activities to broaden my perspectives. For example, my contribution in a robot-dancing team won the team a second place in the robot contest of the university in 2001.

During my collage years, I turned into an outstanding campus singer and guitarist. After a series of band performances and contests, I gained plenty of valuable lessons. I am a confident performer in front of a huge crowd. Moreover, I acquired the spirit of teamwork. As a band member, everyone must act in accord even though he has his own opinions. By struggling to keep the unity of our band, we learned to compromise and to appreciate each other. Additionally, I am willing to try out new ways. Being able to write a song in a new style always delights me. All of these lessons and experience obtained from extra-curricula activities can benefit my academic work.

My Bachelor's thesis

Video of our snake-like robot (1.51 MB .mpg file)

"Debugging and improving the control system of a snake-like robot" is the topic of my bachelor's thesis completed at the Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), one of the best research institutes in the field of robotics in China. The Institute is famous for its "CR-02", a 6000-meter deep-diving Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. I was the first student from the Automation Department of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) who had the privilege to complete a bachelor's thesis at SIA.

My thesis is based on a research project, "Snake-like Robot with Environment Adaptability", a part of China's Hi-Tech Research and Development Program. The snake-like robot is a highly competitive research topic undertaken by researchers in many countries, such as Shigeo Hirose of Japan, Karl. L. Paap of Germany, and NASA. It mimics the locomotive mechanism of a real snake. Successfully designed Snake-like Robots can not only move freely on rough and rugged terrain, but also climbs over barriers, explores oil pipes, and reaches deep to help save lives when a disaster occurs. The snake-like robot therefore has a broad range of applications, especially in countries that have many different landforms.

Our snake-like robot is about 1.5 meters long and can manage four movement patterns: winding, rolling, lateral rolling and flexing. It consists of 16 modules, each of which is equipped with a microcontroller and interconnected via a Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. Because of its importance, this project receives abundant funds from the Natural Science Foundation of China as well as helpful collaboration with Professor Shugen Ma from Ibaraki University of Japan.

As a research assistant at SIA, I focused on the hardware architecture of the snake-like robot's control system. I used my knowledge of the 80x86 microprocessor and the CAN bus architecture and built a RS232-TTL converter module with MAX232. In addition to debugging the microcontroller system, I wrote C programs in the master Microprogrammed Control Unit (Fujitsu MB90F549G) to parse the commands sent from a remote controller so that the robot could alter the locomotive pattern according to the commands and receive GPS signals. The results of my research appear in a paper written in collaboration with my professor and several graduate students entitled, "Design And Realization Of Snake-like Robot Control System." It was published in one of the most prestigious national research journals, ROBOT(Chinese) (Vol.25, No.6, Nov 2003). This experience enriched my knowledge in hardware architecture, and the manual debugging of a sophisticated hardware system remains mentally vivid.

Post-bachelor

From July 2004 to July 2006, I had been working with Professor Larry Rudolph at CSAIL MIT.

Professor Rudolph is the leader of Oxygen Rresearch Group, which aims to enable pervasive, human-centered computing through a combination of user-interface and system technologies. To identify and correct situations that arise in pervasive environments, my project, named "Pervasive Computing Debugger", uses analytical techniques to build a user level debugging tool. I have successfully developed a agents/monitor system with JAVA under the Linux system. The structure of the “debugger” that I built is pretty much like a sensor network. There is a small Agent program running on each device in the pervasive computing environment, collecting records of healthy information, such as Wireless Signal Strength and CPU load. Some independent monitors will probe each device with a changeable frequency, collecting all these healthy records, and store them into databases.

In order to optimize the probing frequency with which the monitor probes each component of a pervasive computing system, I use a technique called Approximate Entropy, which can definine maximal randomness for sequences of arbitrary length, indicating the applicability to sequences as short as N = 5 points. Currently my paper named "Pervasive Computing Debugger" is in progress.

I have also attended the course about Pervasive Human-Centric Computing (6.894) lectured by Professor Rudolph. As class projects, I improved a GUI for a path-finding program with Python. Furthermore, based on the MIT Galaxy System that provides a spoken language interface for on-line information I built a Speech User Interface for this program which is run on iPAQ.

Graduate

Now I'm a graduate at Brandeis University, enjoying my life here... Pile deeper and higher...