Interview with Dr. Harold Liu

Featured Engineer

Dr. Harold Liu

Dr. Harold Liu - Staff Researcher, IBM Research – China

Tell us something about your research career?

I grew up from the electrical engineering background for my first degree at Tsinghua University, where I learned fundamentals of computer science, microwave, circuit and optics, etc. Then, when I became a graduate student at Imperial College London, my research focus concentrated on the niche of wireless networking area, guided by my supervisor Prof. Kin Leung. After the Ph.D., I joined the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories as the PostDoc researcher, where I was lucky to have good exposure to the emerging mobile computing research. Over the years, my knowledge pool deepens and widens up, both in electrical engineering and computer science, which helps me equip with good foundations to be adaptable in many research topics, as well as the ones I am doing here at IBM Research – China.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I like to use OPNET, a network simulator for network modeling and simulation that enable users to develop wireless/wired protocols and technologies, and evaluate enhancements to standards-based protocols. Personally, I feel that the good thing about OPNET is that once we know of the fundamentals for its design process, we could actually build up our own network from scratch, which greatly facilitates the academic research. During my Ph.D., we were lucky to get supported by the University Program of OPNET to grant us a few free licenses to carry on our research projects on wireless mesh networks.

What is on your bookshelf?

I am always keen to keep a few recent copies of IEEE/ACM magazines, which usually highlight the most recent research activities worldwide; I love to have these articles at handy to digest what is going on in the world recently and sit and think what could possibly happen in the near future.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? (special way to analyze circuits, special process you use to make something, etc.)

I strongly believe that even though a good idea could somehow be originated from any individual research scientist, but it does require tremendous amount of efforts in shaping out the good solution through extensive brainstorming with others, or even expertise from other domains. Besides, I am a visual thinker, and I like to draw illustrative figures throughout the brainstorming sessions, and write down any point even though we are not so sure about its usage at that point.

What has been your favorite project?

Our past research project, “Efficient Network Management for Context-Aware Participatory Sensing”, during my employment at Deutsche Telekom, was one of the many that I am proud of and always interested to tell others when asked to. It is developed on the basis of the smartphone-based micro-blogging system, where the querier asks the application for some information about a landmark (such as the size and location of crowds near a tourist site). Then, the application forwards the query to the mobile users near the site. Upon receiving the query, users decide whether they will respond and send data back to the application, where data processing may occur before a result is returned to the querier. The users who supplied data would receive some form of credit from the service provider as a reward for supporting the efficacy of the application. We particularly investigated the network management issues there.

What are you currently working on?

I am currently interested in doing ANYTHING related to the novel concept of the Internet-of-things (IoT). Within many industry applications of IoT, healthcare is one of our focuses, where we designed a novel family-based healthcare monitoring system, called “HealthKiosk”. The proposed solution is patient-driven and service-oriented, and provides a user-friendly interface for visible patient care. HealthKiosk could potentially minimize the efforts of care professionals, not only applicable for the elderly but also children and young fitness trainers. The proposed architecture leverages the RESTful design style, nevertheless introducing a novel development of the sensor proxy, both in the PC style and as a mobile widget. We are please to have our solution piloted at the major hospital in China for diabetes patients.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

Well, this is a good question to answer, and possibly the most interesting question to me; I really enjoy thinking about what could happen in the future, or at least within the research community. Personally, I would like to emphasize a few key words: mobile, sensing, and interactions. For me, there is nothing more inspiring than using the mushroom popularity of smartphones with sensing capabilities, to provide a higher degree of context understanding through interactive communications among the machines and users.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Internet-of-Things (IoT) could be a big challenge not only for the industry, but also for the whole academia; or even more challenging and complicated if we consider the potential consumers; I mean the business aspects on the technology. Personally, I feel that it may fundamentally change the way we think, behave, and react to the environment, not only with the things, but also anyone we may or may not know.