Hobbies and Activities

Hobbies

I am a big fan of sports activities, such as soccer, running (did my first Marathon in May 2013), swimming, and table tennis. Some recent additions include tennis and golf. When I have more time, I will go on a hiking or biking trip with my friends.

My non-sporty hobbies include reading, poker (Texas Hold'em) and doing some geeky stuff. I enjoy traveling, and am a beginner to meditation.

Activities

Besides coursework and research, I am involved in various leadership activities. In 2010, I served as the VP Academic for the EECS Graduate Student Association (GSA), and worked with a group of wonderful people to organize academic and career events for EECS graduate students. I also serve as one of the EECS representatives to the MIT Graduate Student Council (GSC) in academic year 2012-2013.

Back at the University of Toronto, I was the Faculty Representative for 0T7 Electrical Engineering students from 2005 to 2006, and I also served as a student representative in the ECE Lecturer Search Committee in 2007.

Acknowledgements

I am fortunate to receive the following fellowships and awards, and would like to acknowledge the generosity of the sponsors here.

Graduate studies

• Wellington and Irene Loh Fund Fellowship (for Spring 2014)
• 2011 Claude E. Shannon Research Assistantship
• NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship: Doctoral level (2010 -- 2013)
• MIT Hewlett Packard Fellowship (2009)
• NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship: Master level (2009 -- 2010)
• MIT Irwin M. Jacobs and Joan K. Jacobs Presidential Fellowship (2008)

Undergraduate studies

• William L. Everitt Student Award of Excellence from International Engineering Consortium (2008)
• J.E. Reid Memorial Prize (2008)
• NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Awards (2005 & 2007)
• CPAC TD Meloche Monnex Scholarship (2007)
• CSUA Broadcast Technology Scholarship(2007)
• The Adel S. Sedra Outstanding Student Awards (2006)
• IEEE Canada-Toronto Section Scholarship (2006)
• Andrew Alexander Kinghorn Scholarship (2006)
• Nortel Institute Undergraduate Scholarship (2006)

Geeky stuff

In the old days I programmed in C/C++, occasionally in Java. Now Python is my favorite choice, but I can use Ruby as well. Vim is the text editor that I cannot live without!

Over time I have written various scripts and Vim plugins to make some tasks more efficient, and I will release them once I get time to package them up.

• vim-pandoc: a Vim plugin for the excellent pandoc!
• vim-doctest: a Vim plugin to execute python doctest and display results in the same window. Essential for test-driven development!
• pyzoetero: a collection of Python scripts that interface with the bibliography manager Zotero.
• local_mapreduce: a Python script that implements the MapReduce paradigm on a local machine in parallel via xargs. This is suitable if you are processing a few GBs of data on a decent multi-core machine and want to get it done fast.
• awk_split: a script that split the contents in a file based on certain substring patterns of each line.

Some facts...

• My email address on Home is obfuscated via javascript. It is effective based on the number of spam emails I received.
• I edit this homepage via HTML and CSS directly. Thanks to Vim, it is actually easy!
• All my internships during grad school involve writing code in Python.
• I like prime numbers.