Tell me a little about yourself
I was adopted from Chengdu, China and grew up in Salisbury, Maryland (locals call it “Smallsbury,” you can imagine why). In 2015, I pursued a Dual B.S. in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Here, I held a variety of mentoring/tutoring/teaching positions for courses such as Cell Biology, Circuits, and Computer Science (primarily to stay financially afloat). After my undergraduate studies, I went on to pursue a doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2019. I currently work at the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) as a Research Assistant under Dr. Navid Asadizanjani. Here, I identify vulnerabilities in the electronics supply chain and develop ways to detect/prevent malicious modifications to electronic systems. I am super excited to work with a variety of individuals from academia, industry, and the government to enhance hardware security in the electronics community! In my free time, I bake with my sourdough starter named Arthur, pester my dog named Gramps, and watch anime.
Please list your research interests
My primary research interests are image processing, computer vision, and machine learning. Applications I am interested in include, but are not limited to: hardware assurance, medical diagnostics, mobility-enhancing technologies, and biometrics. I am unsure what I will be doing in the future, but I know I’ll be happy in pretty much any challenging field which seeks to help people!
What highlight some of your current projects and achievements
Project: Automatic Bill of Materials Extraction for PCB Assurance
A Bill of Materials (BoM) is a complete inventory of all components present on a printed circuit board (PCB), e.g. resistors, capacitors, and integrated circuits (ICs). BoMs can be used in a variety of applications in the domain of PCB reverse engineering, hardware assurance, and industrial assessment. In this project, we seek to automatically extract a PCB’s BoM, given optical images. My role primarily concerns data collection, intelligent algorithm development in Python, and project management. Currently, I am working on color normalization using standard color checkers, image processing/computer vision feature extraction, and marking detection and recognition.
Publications: I’ve had the pleasure of working with many dedicated individuals. Thanks to all my collaborators, we’ve had the privilege of being able to output several conference papers, journal papers, and patents. The latest publication I’ve been working on is “Color Normalization for Robust Automatic Bill of Materials Generation and Visual Inspection of PCBs,” which was accepted to ISTFA 2020.
Leadership: In addition, I also hold a few leadership roles on campus. as Tutoring Chair of Eta Kappa Nu (HKN), I organize review sessions for fundamental undergraduate courses in electrical and computer engineering. As Industry Outreach Chair of ECE Graduate Student Organization (GSO), I regularly communicate and organize industry outreach events. As a Supervised Teaching Assistant for Image Processing/Computer Vision, I design MATLAB homework assignments and exams.