To those who are interested in AME program

Hi,

My name is Ruby, an AME student coming from Taiwan. This is my second semester in AME but I have learned much. I feel this is an ideal place for my research and I'd like to share my experience here with you.

AME is an interdisciplinary program. Through the courses it offers and lots of discussions among faculty and students, I become more and more clear why interdisciplinary research that we're trying to do here is needed and significant. The main theme in this program, is "media". Things that express, represent and communicate human experience, concepts or ideas can be viewed as media. You can see from our web site many interesting research areas/applications are going on, such as mediated biosystem, situated communication, etc.--we are trying to experiment with media from several very different aspects.

Such research require deep understanding in multiple disciplines. We are trained in two ways, by taking courses that solidate our theoretical backgrounds in arts/media/engineering, and by participating in research applications and working with other students and faculty to deal with research problems in practice. For me, such parallel training is very helpful. Every course I took provides new materials to inspire my research, and in other hand, dealing with research problems makes me learn efficiently about the course materials.

As for my research, I learn the most from my advisor, Hari Sundaram. He help me develop systematical research methodologies and the ways to criticize others' and my own research methods. Besides, he encourages us to do "different" research--thinking and exploring the essence of things from intuition and then discovering solutions, not just (blindly) searching technical approaches. I think I have made great progress this year in my studies through his guidance and there are still much that I can learn from him, which is fantastic! You will find how amazing being Hari's student when you come here.

My background is in computer graphics and I worked for a multimedia software company before I came here. I love visual arts and I'm eager to learn things behind the visual representation--I guess that's one of the reason I'm here :) My current research focuses on analysis of social networks, particularly on analysis and visualization of the blog networks. If you are interested or have experience in problems related to multimedia, web, and information system, we can share our ideas with each other and I'm looking forward to that!

I'll be glad if I can offer more help on your considering our program. Please feel free to ask if you have any other problem regarding to study here. Looking forward to meeting you!

Cheers,
Ruby