Welcome to my personal website.
Currently I'm a platform engineer at Yahoo! Brickhouse in San Francisco. Brickhouse is an innovation group within Yahoo! with a startup mentality. Two of the Brickhouse projects I've worked on were Kickstart and Live. Kickstart is a social networking site that aims to help recent graduates to get the initial connections they need to land their first jobs. Live is essentially a live video service that allows everyone with a webcam to broadcast online but with a twist that even the viewers of the broadcast could broadcast themselves in "coview" windows, creating a more dynamic broadcasting and viewing experience. During my time at Brickhouse, I developed the Kickstarter recommender engine that matches users according to the compatibility of their profiles for Kickstart. For Live, my main responsibility was to develop and maintain the real-time chat component. I also contributed to designing and developing highly scalable back-end infrastructure for both projects.
I completed my postdoctoral research under Prof. Agogino at Berkeley Expert System Laboratory at UC Berkeley and also received my Ph.D. degree in Engineering at UC Berkeley. My research interest is in utilizing computational linguistic algorithms in information retrieval applications. Since coming to Berkeley in 1998, I have been involved in developing an educational digital library for engineering education called NEEDS and later the Engineering Pathway (EP) project.
My doctoral research at UC Berkeley was on generating key phrases from a domain-specific corpus automatically using a combination of computational linguistic algorithms. The results can be applied to many information retrieval applications such as recommending additional search keywords for enhancing search results. I'm also interested in design methodologies and design team research.
In my free time, I like to listen to music and travel. One of my ambitions that I'd like to be able to achieve one day is to visit every national parks in US. I also enjoy movies and I have been watching quite some Japanese animation in the past few years. I'm always surprised by the creativity and varieties shown in many Japanese animation, both on TV and in theaters.