A new start

It has been a long time since my last post here. Now I have already started my M.Phil. life at HKUST and I'm really glad that I have the chance. I've got used to the new research life and my labmates are all very nice. My supervisor has not assigned me much work yet, so I'm temporarily leading a happy and easy life :-). Currently I just need to read some papers, report every week and help my boss review papers. How about next semester or two? Maybe quite different. My supervisor has recently raised the graduation requirement from 2 conf papers to 1 journal, which truely agonized all his M.Phil. candidates.

One sentence is true: the more you learn, the more you realize how ignorant you are. I've already started researching but I began to get lost in one question: what is research? I don't have a definite answer, and found that the true research is not what I have thought of in the past 1 year. To achieve real success, I really need to learn painstakingly and figure out a specific direction worth researching. And I highly recommend CSE & ECE guys here to read the article 《由简至美的最佳论文--Best Paper Award of CVPR 2009》. This artile could tell many principles that are quite beneficial for research. Anyway, although a bit lost, I do not want to deny the interesting aspects of research itself, especially CVPR. That's why there are so many CVPR guys here. I'm very interested in this field, and would be very glad to communicate with people who share the same research interests.

In this semester I selected two courses which are respectively Stochastic Process and Machine Learning.  Stochastic Process is boring, while Machine Learning is a course quite interesting. Things studied in Machine Learning proved to be truely essential and crucial in my research. Another course that would be very intersting is the Convex Optimization, a course that I will learn in my second year. On the other hand, this course is said to be quite tough. I think it's very important to find a course useful, since the sense of usefulness often leads to the feeling of interest, which is at least true according to my experience. Looking back to my undergraduate courses, I seldom found those stuffs interesting simply because I don't know what they were teached for, especially politics courses. Thus that period became the time when I skip my courses most -- almost no attendence at some courses for the whole semester. This  is sth I would never do now XD.

BTW, I have recently started my HKUST Homepage: http://ihome.ust.hk/~zdyu. So welcome to visit my website.

Since my arrival at HK, I have learned and experienced much more. These experiences are gradually changing me, from my behaviors to my opinions towards career and society. And this process will still take place in the future, no matter where I am and what I have been through.

Happy Single's Day!

Today, I'd really like to introduce a very funny festival in China – The Single's Day(aka 光棍节). It's Nov 11, the famous Single's Day in China - a festival for single person 'invented' by some Chinese college students. (They picked up Nov 11 since 11-11 have so much 'single's)

The first time I knew this was in 2002. My freshman year in HUST. I do remember that night, after lights out, guys in our apartment started to shout and throw stuff outside the window to celebrate (in fact they are just having too much hormone #lol). Luckily our apartment was just next to a girl's apartment and they even shouted back. Then some of the guys got extremely excited and as you may guess – they almost threw all the stuff in their room then could throw, including a CRT monitor!! Hoho…no one had a good sleep that night…

Why Chinese people are so creative on this? I think, in western countries, people fall in love and even have sex at a much younger age than us. In China, due to our restricted traditional culture and college-entering pressure(actually very stupid and time-wasting education program), it's really hard to think about love in high school. So when the boys and girls enter a brand new pressure-free place, they would really find some way to change their poor life.

Frankly I'm really too old and too 'sweet' to celebrate, but Single's Day is really a good festival created by Chinese college students, so let's bless the singles :)