Interview Essay

By: Jimmy Karns

Over the course of three interviews I was able to interact and learn about material from very intelligent people I would have originally not spoken to. The professor I interviewed is named Dong Xuan. Dr. Xuan is a professor in computer science and engineering and teaches computer science classes in the subject area of networking. Dr. Xuan received his electrical engineering degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong university, and received his Ph.D. in computer engineering from Texas A&M University. His knowledge in computer networking provided insight to a new area of computer science I was not as familiar with. The graduate teacher’s assistance (GTA) and assistant professor I interviewed was Chunyi Peng.  Peng received her degree in computer science at UCLA and started teaching at OSU in 2009. Peng, like Dr. Xuan, focuses on areas of wireless and computer networking. Peng teaches classes that range from computer science in advanced technology to computer networking. The upperclassmen I interviewed was Yena Kim. Ms. Kim is a fourth year majoring in biomedical engineering and plans to attend medical school next year.

            The process I used for finding the professor and GTA was looking on the computer science and engineering page and looking at the classes each professor teaches and subject I was interested in. From there I approached the professors during office hours for each of the classes, after reading one or two research papers and experiments the professor and GTA. I was easily able to answer a couple questions about the research the professor and GTA participated in. I then revisited them a second time to answer questions pertaining to what I needed to learn for this assignment. The upperclassmen on the other hand was a friend from back home who happened to be in a STEM related major. I contacted her earlier and was able to meet up with her and learn more about her major as well as her experience in OSU.

Ms. Yena Kim, a fourth year majoring in biomedical engineering was able to shed light onto some of her experiences at OSU. Ms. Kim has already participated in two different internships, one over the summer at the Cleveland Clinic where she spent time doing stem cell research. And another doing research with one of her professors. She greatly emphasized how resourceful your professors are for research. They’re all working outside of class for something else so it can never hurt to peek interest in their field of research. Ms. Kim said that her major did provide for a lot of stress and didn’t give her much free time. Her ways of coping with stress and these difficult situations was to minimize how often they happened by just being on top of her school work. She talked about how she doesn’t let her free time go to waste and tries not to procrastinate.

The graduate student I interviewed was Chunyi Peng. Peng has done much research in the field of computer networking and network security. Peng’s intense knowledge in these areas made understanding what she was talking about difficult, but by reading one of her scholarly articles beforehand I was able to bring up some random facts and quotes for her to elaborate on and made me sound more knowledgeable in her field as well. When I asked Peng about how the computer science staff and faculty worked together she said how tight knit they are and how many of them perform research together. When I asked her how she decided to pick a major and become prepared she had just said technology was always something interesting to her and loved to see connections through it. How people are able to stay in touch just from a certain arrangement of metal and electricity always baffled her. She told me to pick a major where if you think about it too long makes you confused and wanting to know more about it. She said she decided to attend graduate school in order to do more research and learn more about the area she loves.

The process of finding scholarly articles was just as easy as finding my professor and GTA. Under their sites on OSU it lists scholarly articles and research they have participated in. For my GTA I read the article called “Detecting Problematic Control-Plane Protocol Interactions in Mobile Networks.” Which was an extremely detailed article talking about how mobile networking can cause problems when it comes to interactions in the wireless area. The other article I read was called “Enabling Energy-Proportional Cellular Base Station Networks.” Which talked about more mobile energy conservation and created of more stations to relay service in the most efficient manner. As for my professor’s research I read “Sequential Sample Consensus: A Robust Algorithm for Video-based Face Recognition.” Which talked about artificial intelligence in the sense of video facial recognition. The applications for this apply to many different areas of criminal justice and security. The other article I read was a called “A Service for Controlling Information Dissemination in Wireless Networks.” This article talked about how to potentially mix wireless signals to alter the transmission and reception a user gets when they request something online. This is greatly applicable in the world of hacking data “in the air”. I was able to find most of these articles from google scholar, but if it was not on there, OSU had downloadable ebooks for these articles or I could just find them online. The language used was very difficult to understand but through repetitive skimming I was able to get a good idea about the subject material.

The professor I interviewed, Dong Xuan, a professor in computer science and engineering that focuses on artificial intelligence and computer networking. After discussing the details of their research, which sounded very interesting I was able to ask about the classes they taught in general and how these are applicable in real life. I felt as though I was asking the most softball questions to a professor than had an overwhelming wealth of intelligence. Dr. Xuan was very kind in bearing with me through my questions as I learned more about him and his experiences in education.

In all I felt the interviews were extremely helpful and something I would have never done unless I was given this assignment. Personally I felt that the professor was the most interesting to talk to because I felt as though Dr. Xuan had spent an entire century studying his field, the little bit of light he was able to shed onto me made his research seem so much more interesting. It was one thing to read an extremely high level article about research I can’t comprehend, and another thing to actually meet the person who researched it.

References

Guan-Hua Tu, Yuanjie Li, Chunyi Peng, Chiyu Li, Songwu Lu, 2016, “Detecting Problematic Control-Plane Protocol Interactions in Mobile Networks.” IEEE Transactions on Networking 24, no. 2, 1209 – 1222.

Chunyi Peng, Suk-Bok Lee, Songwu Lu, Haiyun Luo, 2014, “GreenBSN: Enabling Energy-Proportional Cellular Base Station Networks.” IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 13, no. 11, 2537 – 2551.

Xinfeng Li*, Jin Teng*, Boying Zhang*, Adam C. Champion* and Dong Xuan, 2014, “TurfCast: A Service for Controlling Information Dissemination in Wireless Networks.”IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) 13, no. 2, 13 –

Sihao Ding, Ying Li, Junda Zhu, Yuan F. Zheng and Dong Xuan, 2015, “Sequential Sample Consensus: A Robust Algorithm for Video-based Face Recognition.” IEEE Transactions on Circuits and System for Video Technology 25, no. 10, 1586 – 1598.