About me

I was born in Luoyang, an ancient city in central China. I entered Beijing Institute of Technology in 1989, and lived in Beijing for 11 years. I met my wife Jun at graduate school, who is from Sanya, a beautiful seaside city in south China. We got married in 1998, when I was a PhD student and Jun a teacher at Tsinghua University.

After my graduation in 2000, we went to Singapore. I worked as a Postdoc at National University of Singapore. Jun entered Purdue University in 2001, and I worked in Singapore for 3 more years, before I came to US to join her.

Our baby girl is coming, whose name is Anna (stands for Indiana) W.L. (stands for West Lafayette).

I like GO, computers, books, movies, and travel a little bit.

Computers & me

The 1st time I heard a computer is in 1983, when I was in junior high. My old buddy Zhijian drew a rabbit for me on his dad's computer. I didn't have any chance to touch a computer until 1989, when I entered college. But those old school Apple II were not funny at all. Eventually, an IBM 8086 brought me a whole new world, when I was doing my final project in 1993. A computer-man I became since then.

I ranked No. 9 in 150 students of ME Department before the undergraduate final year, while top 4% (6/150) students could get their addmission from graduate school directly, entrance examination waived. I got a ticket just by luck, because one classmate ranked higher than me selected UIUC later, other two failed their foreign language exams. I might choose Computer Science if I had to take the entrance examination of graduate school.

My final project was Computer Aided Statistic Process Control, something about Quality Control. I made a Turbo C-like interface for my program with C Language on an IBM 8086, and one of my classmates thought I got the TC source code from somewhere. When Prof. Pang, my advisor, and I demostrated the program on a QC conference, a publisher noticed it. He told me it may be sold as a Computer Aided Instruction software with some improvement. I worked on the revision for one week, but Beijing Municipal Bureau of Copyright didn't approve it for some reason.

When President Clinton announced that the "Information Highway" in 1995, I had no idea about Internet yet, even local area networks were rare in Beijing at that time. Next year, I entered Tsinghua University, which is a bigger school and one of the earliest networked schools. First BBS, then WWW, FTP..., I began to enjoy surfing.

About Alpha Space

Alpha Space was first created in 1996, when I was a PhD student and a part-time Management Assistant at Tsinghua University. Mr. Maolin Zhou from Human Resource Department, asked me to learn something about HTML, and build a website for Tsinghua HR. Alpha Space is one of the byproducts. Later I had to desert it because I was exhausted by research, dissertation, graduation, job seeking...

Alpha Space was recaptured around 2002, when I was a Postdoc at National University of Singapore.

Now I am trying to invest a little more on it, taking the last chance before my baby girl's coming.