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The Value of Communications
 Aesthetic
Scientist Interview with Xiaoning He, Ph.D., Research Engineer,
Network Architecture Laboratory, DoCoMo USA Labs
Q:
Tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up?
A:
In Beijing, China. I received my bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua
University. Actually, my dad and I are in the very same field, in
exactly the same department. I was born into an engineering family.
Q:
Tell me about growing up with your dad?
A:
My dad is an engineer and he received his degree in Canada. After
that he went back to China and worked in the same company for over
40 years. Thanks to my Dad, I saw all kinds of communications and
technology-related things, like radios and other devices.
Q:
What was your first computer?
A:
I got my first computer when I was about nine years old –
it had only 3K memory, I can still remember it. You can’t
do a whole lot with 3K but it was great. It was a very early computer
which I forget the name of,it was earlier than Apple II. I still
remember it could only write 500 lines of code…over that,
the computer couldn’t handle it.
Q:
Were you writing code at 10 years old?
A:
No. I joined a computer club when I was 13. That’s how I got
my computer background.
Q:
What kind of things did you work on in the computer club?
A:
It was a computer club in middle school. Something like seventh
grade in America - junior high. They had 40 Apple IIs. At that time,
people felt that computers were the future and my dad said, “Just
go there and learn it”. There was a teacher who taught us
about the BASIC language, and we played a lot of computer games.
That was pretty much it - 50 percent of the time we played computer
games, and 50 percent of the time we wrote some very simple programs,
like how to draw a circle on the screen. It was actually very interesting
stuff for me at that age.
Q:
Did you get a new computer at that time?
A:
No, because the computer was a luxury at that moment. It was very,
very expensive.
Q:
At the time, there was only a small group of people in the world
who had computers, and I would imagine it is even a smaller group
of people inside China.
A:
Yes, that’s true My dad brought the computer back from Canada
to China. That’s how I got it. There’s no way I could
buy one within China at that time.
Q:
Did it have foreign language capabilities when he brought it back
or did you do all your work in English?
A:
The computer was only in English and I didn’t know English.
The only thing I could do was to ask my dad, “Okay”,
what is this supposed to mean? Keep in mind that that computer was
very, very simple and could only handle 500 lines of code - so that
means there were not many computer commands that I had to learn.
In fact, the first English words I learned after “hello”,
were “ready”, “run”, “load”
and “save”.
Q:
So your first words in English were computer ”language”
so to speak.
A:
Yes, kind of.
Q:
What did you do with the computer club? How did you evolve your
computer skills?
A:
A lot of people think computer games are interesting, but I found
out that what I was more interested in was programming. I wrote
programs, and later on – in high school - entered competitions.
Unfortunately, I didn’t win anything. But it helped to improve
my programming skill.
Q:
How did the competitions work?
A:
They gave us three or four questions with two hours to finish. They’d
score you based on their evaluation of your solution.
Q:
I imagine it was interesting to see that there were different paths
to the same solution.
A:
Yes, that is part of what I enjoy about programming.
Q:
After you completed the computer classes and the computer club,
where did you go next?
A:
To Tsinghua University, majoring in communications.
Q:
When you were in university, did you write a paper or did you have
a particular course of study or a particular area of interest in
communications?
A:
It was a different style from an American university. In China,
what we have is more basic. I went to a five-year undergraduate
program. That is different from most of the universities in China.
Generally speaking, our university has four-year undergraduate programs.
In
the first three years, everyone in the same department takes the
same basic courses. After the fourth year, we take professional
courses tailored for our particular research direction, and people
split into groups based on that direction. For graduation we’re
asked to do a 30- minute presentation and Q&A on a project we
have done.
Q:
What did you do for a project?
A:
I reported on my experience at my intern job at a satellite company
that I had begun at the end of my fourth year. I participated in
the development of a remote monitoring and control system for satellite
ground devices via telephone network. The company had a lot of satellite
devices all over the country, if there was a problem, they have
to send an engineer to fix the problem - and they didn’t want
to do it. Since most of time it can be fixed without human interaction.
They just wanted to use the modem and the Internet to do as much
repair as they can, so they needed a system. I joined agroup of
people developing a remote, satellite ground device monitors and
control systems.
Q:
What interested you about that job?
A:
It was the only internship I could find. It wasn’t easy to
find an internship, because the company has to pay you, andyou’re
only an undergraduate. Most of the time the company has to train
you, but you’ll be there for only three or four months. It’s
a lot trouble for the companies to do it. We went in groups - three
people went to the same company. Of course, you had to find something
in your field and that job turned out to be very interesting.
Q: How did you end up selecting Penn State?
A:
Two things. Penn State has an excellent, large electrical engineering
department. It is in the top 20 if I remember correctly. Among the
universities that accepted me and offered me full financial support,
Penn State was the best.
Q:
What did you study at Penn State?
A:
Communications in electrical engineering
Q:
Any particular aspect within that?
A:
I did a lot of research on network optimization, where you try to
optimize both higher layer and lower layer performance. That’s
what I wrote both my masters and PhD on – both at Penn State.
Q:
What lab are you in here?
A:
Before it was called ACL, Autonomous Communication Lab and now it’s
is called NAL, Network Architecture Lab.
Q:
How big is the team?
A:
We have six people.
Q:
How is it collaborating with other people within the labs?
A:
Its good, You have to work together.
I realize there are no single smartest persons in the world. You
can get a lot of new ideas from collaborating and exchanging with
others.
Q:
And is it easy to do so here? Is it conducive to that kind of interaction?
A:
Yes. The company encourages collaboration between people, labs,
projects, and so on.
Q: What’s your vision for technology in general? Where
do you see technology going?
A:
The best technology always meets people’s needs. That’s
what I feel. What does that mean? All the most successful technology
is ultimately satisfying people’s most important needs. For
example, we have telephones that make it so we can communicate with
other people. Wireless is so popular because people like freedom,
they want to travel, and go everywhere freely. That’s why
wireless has become so popular. I believe the future of technology
will allow people to do whatever they want, anytime, and generally
in any place.
Q:
How do you imagine that this will develop?
A:
Communications is a big part of it. I read a book saying that the
communications field is one of the very few fields that is always
growing. Think about the many spin-offs of the communications field
- TV, radio, satellite, cellular. I recall that I was taught that
people are social animals; communication is one of their fundamental
demands. Technology will make communication easier, more vivid,
and more convenient.
Q:
Vivid?
A:
Yes. If you look at the TV in the hallway, you will see people that
are projected as holograms and stuff like that. You can see the
people in 3D. That’s part of our dream here.
Q:
What are your personal dreams for your own life?
A:
I just want to help create something that will benefit many people.
–
Let
me tell you a little story; When I was a child and my dad was in
Canada, he was there for a long time - four years - and he never
came back home during that period of time. We didn’t have
a telephone in our home, so we had to go to a public telephone -
and there weren’t many public telephones either. We had to
go to the post office to make that phone call, which was not very
convenient and was very expensive. I was only six years old when
my dad went to Canada. I really missed him and wantedto call him
, And now, think how easy it is for people to call people on the
other end of the world, thanks to developments in technology. I
just want to make that kind of thing happen. That’s my dream.
Q:
Do you have a favorite quote?
A:
It is in Chinese. Sorry about it. It literally means, when people
go on a very long journey like 100 miles, 50 percent of them will
fail by the time they reach 90 miles. They do not have the persistence
to complete the journey, they just gave up. Only miles left. They
didn’t see any way out, they just gave up hope. But in reality
the success was just right around the corner; if they went just
one step further, they’d have seen the light.
Research
is something like that. In research, you don't really know what's
there. No one tells you how to do it. You have to find the way to
do it, and you can spend a lot of time on failures, and you might
feel like giving up. But quite often you really have to give another
push and maybe you will find another way out. That’s how I
see it, you can’t quit, you need to follow through–
that’s the translation more or less. the quote.
Q:
So in summary you might say that “persistence begets discovery”.
A:
Yes
Q:
Thank You
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