On the afternoon of November 26th, 2009, Professor Andrew Yao chaired the second ITCS group meeting of the autumn semester in Room 4-603, FIT Building. Associate Professor Yuexuan Wang, Xiaoming Sun, postdoctoral researchers, visitors, ITCS graduate students and the staff attended this meeting.
At the beginning, Professor Yao introduced Dr. Liangjie Zhang to the attendees. Dr. Zhang is currently a senior researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center, and is the founder of the IBM Services Computing Discipline and the Chairman of the IEEE Services Computing Technical Committee. For a long time, he has engaged in the innovative development and promotion of service computing, e-commerce, interactive multimedia and digital television, broadband network control, Homo Sapiens information processing and intelligent home appliances, and has made outstanding achievements in these fields. Afterwards, Dr. Zhang made a short speech at the meeting, sharing with the audience his academic research experiences, which were warmly welcomed by everyone present.
In what follows, several students shared their experiences in attending international conferences around the world this semester. In the past few months, many students from ITCS attended international conferences in places such as America, Europe etc. which not only served as a chance for them to touch the frontier research areas and expand their academic horizons, but also provided them with an opportunity to experience the customs and practices of foreign countries. Liwen Xu and Xiao Qi had gone to the US to attend the CASES’09 meeting. In addition to the academic achievements they had made, the hamburger in Los Angeles had impressed them a lot. Youming Qiao had met with many an exciting and novel thing in UC Berkeley and Princeton University during RANDOM 2009. Xiaohui Bei, Tiancheng Lou and Jialin Zhang attended ESA 2009 in September, during which they not only enhanced their speech skills and got a deeper understanding of the related areas, but also enjoyed the exotic scenery in Europe. Decheng Dai and Wu Yu shared with the audience their unforgettable travel experience and some new academic thoughts during FOCS 2009 in October. Apart from these, postdocs such as Elad Verbin, Maurice Jansen, Jayalal Sarma M.N., Yongcai Wang and Victor Chen also shared with us some interesting anecdotes they had met with in attending international conference and the latest research results.
For most of the students in ITCS, it was the first time for them to attend international conferences and have a chance to make a speech in it. As Liwen Xu said, “It’s a good start for one’s academic research career.” Having an open mind for doing research international-wide is the central principle of ITCS in cultivating talents. The institute will spare no efforts in providing students with more opportunities for international exchanges and communication, and in building a first-class academic research platform for everyone.
