Interview with Dr. Yiran Chen

                                By Fiona Rawsontile, Dec 2015

I think I could say that whoever knows Dr. Chen, personally or professionally, would agree that his career, while still in a young and aspiring stage, is purely legendary. I’m excited to find out what I’m going to learn from him today.

Fiona: After you have graduated from Purdue with a Ph.D., you worked in industry for five years. Why did you decide to go back to academia?

Dr. Chen: I was asked this question by many of my colleagues and students. The truth is that the research lab I was working in was dismissed during the last economic crisis. The company deployed all the researchers to product departments as R&D engineers, including me. However, having been “spoiled” by the freedom offered by the research lab, I was unable and unwilling to adapt myself to the life of an ordinary engineer. So after nine months, I quit and joined my current university. The manager did not even know I had a Ph.D. until my resignation, or maybe they simply did not care.

Fiona: When people talk about your achievements, they often mention your wife, who’s an equally accomplished engineer in the same field. How would you describe your professional relationship with her?

Dr. Chen: My wife is my (without “one of the”) best partner in my career. We had the same Ph.D. Advisor at Purdue, and now we are working in the same department of our institution. As a couple, we simply 100% trust each other in all aspects. (Fiona commented: That can be boring sometimes.) For example, you never need to worry about if your editing on her draft would harm her feeling. I think both of us benefit significantly from this mutual trust, which makes our collaboration extremely efficient.

Fiona: Do you two discuss about work at home? Who wins more often when disputes occur?

Dr. Chen: Yes, we do discuss about work at home. We have many divergences in our work, but we always manage to reach an agreement when attending to the students. Neither of us always wins, though my wife claims she is the one who often gives in (which is questionable, in my humble opinion).

Fiona: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) Related to the last question, what do you think is the overall condition of engineering women in industry or academia, in terms of competence, promotional opportunities, peer recognition, etc.?

Dr. Chen: Women are normally considered as “minorities” in engineering. Under this presumption, the current systems of both industry and academia provide women engineers and professors with many additional opportunities. In fact, I think academia offers even more than industry through creating special programs or considerations in hiring and research funding. A female engineer or professor is also more visible (say, easier to be noticed or remembered) during daily working contacts. Nonetheless, female engineers and professors often encounter more difficulties when being considered for administrative positions.

Fiona: Do they tend to be better or worse than men with regard to certain skills?

Dr. Chen: In academia, my observation is that female professors are more aggressive (of course, not everyone) than their counterparts in industry. I am not sure whether it means that academic life is harsher, or only the “aggressive” women would choose academia. I don’t see any difference between male or female engineers from technical perspectives, but apparently female engineers take more responsibilities for their families than male engineers. That may explain some of our observations.

Fiona: Your 35-page single-spaced CV told me you must be a genius as well as an extremely busy person. How could you find time for serving as journal editors, conference organizers, panel reviewers, and numerous service and dissertation committees, while maintaining high productivity with several ongoing federally funded projects (there are 14 manuscripts under review at this moment!)? Do you have secrets in time management?

Dr. Chen: You have to prioritize them and attend to the most important tasks first. Not everything is equally important and their value alters at different phases of your career. I work hard, of course, but in academia almost everybody (if not all) is working hard. If I have any secret, I think that is probably motivating my team effectively: my students participate in writing proposals, coordinating meetings with collaborators and funding agencies, and helping with many administrative and logistic duties of mine. Through learning from these extra activity, they become well prepared for the “cruel” society they will be facing upon graduation.

（插入作者高妹/Fiona的话：向大家推荐我正在连载的玄幻---武打---佛道---言情故事《魅羽活佛》，晋江链接：http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=4880087  故事简介：鬼道中的魇荒门，七个师姐妹都以绝世美颜著称。然而这次的任务中，二弟子魅羽却要化作一个中年油腻肥秃僧，卷入佛国、道门，和修罗界的斗争. 还要让咱们古往今来文采武功都称霸天下的帅哥活佛，对她一见倾心，矢志不渝。）

Fiona: Considering the short duration you have worked as a college professor, the number of students and postdocs you have trained is impressive. Do you mentor them on an individual basis or rely mostly on lab culture and peer supervision?

Dr. Chen: We have two types of meetings – weekly 1-1’s and small study-group meetings. We have only one general group meeting per semester because it is hard to find a meeting room for 40 people and such a meeting is often inefficient. With a hierarchical personnel structure, senior students help me mentor the juniors. I monitor students’ research progress through 1-1 meetings, which I try my best to protect even considering my busy travel schedule, as well as weekly reports. I usually tell them what I want to see rather than what they need to do. They figure out the details by themselves or with other students. Luckily, our group is sufficiently large so that they can always find an expert to answer their questions. I have never laid off any students (so far), but our peer pressure is huge with so many productive members. In short, we run as an efficient team, in which individual genius is not critical.

Fiona: Now that all of you students are productive and competent, can you tell which ones are more likely to succeed as scientists, which ones should aim at industrial leadership? Has anyone disappointed you with his/her decision?

Dr. Chen: First of all, not ALL of them are productive or competent. People like to imagine that we have different requirements of personal characteristics for scientists and industry leaders. Unfortunately, this presumption does not hold. There are common personality traits shared by both roles: persistence, diligence, teamworking … I am happy as long as my students become successful, be it academia or industry.

Fiona: Hollywood likes to portrait us scientists as long gray haired nerds who have little idea about how the society outside our labs functions. Tell us about the online bookstore you cofounded as a college student. Are you still participating in the management? Do you have plans for other types of business in the future?

Dr. Chen: I quit from the online-store business around 2004 and am no longer a part of the team. Since then, many of the people I worked with have become important figures in the Chinese Internet industry. That was one of my most valuable investments in terms of personal connections. In China, there is a popular saying, “Personal connection is the first productive force”. Although meant to be a joke, it does state a truth that your reputations and personal connections are vital for your career, and I carefully maintain them. In addition, if you have gone through the whole process of building a startup, you would know whom you want to work with, what you can and cannot do. I like trying new things, and I will experiment with some kind of start-up in the future. In fact, I think we have already come up with some good ideas, and we’ll see.

Fiona: Entrepreneurial mindset is currently a hot topic in the engineering disciplines. For students who are still pursuing their degrees, do you think it helps to bring up their awareness of industrial opportunities, risk management, etc., or would you rather have them focus on basic engineering skills, e.g., signal processing, without being overly distracted?

Dr. Chen: Although I started my own company when I was a M.S. student, I am generally against the idea of sacrificing your study for commercial opportunities. I still remember when I told the advisor of my M.S. thesis how “successful” my start-up was, he said, “I agree with you that you might have learned things that extend beyond the scope of school, but the reason we still need education is that other things, some of which are essential in the make of a scientist or a businessman, can ONLY be taught at academia.” Those are the words that will be kept in my mind forever and shared with my students.

Fiona: Would you also like to share the experience of organizing the concert for two famous singers at Tsinghua?

Dr. Chen: Ahha! Jian Li and Jie Miao are very famous now, and I’m happy to have witnessed their growth in our young age and early stage of their career. I was the producer of that concert, and I still consider it as one of my proudest accomplishments. You wouldn’t believe we only spent RMB12000 organizing the whole concert, and I still owe one of the two singers RMB2000 for the recording tapes we used.

Fiona: Did the concert bring back enough gross to cover the expenses?

Dr. Chen: No. If I remember correctly, the admission was free because ticket pricing would have taken a long time to be approved. You can imagine how hard it was to get a ticket. Many famous singers and musicians attended the concert: “Lao Lang”, Gengxu Lu, Xiaosong Gao, Jie Li … After the concert, we had an exclusive party for the rest of the night in a pub named BlueJay in the university neighborhood. I met Jian and Jie again at the 60th anniversary party of the department I graduated from, and we were glad to see all of us doing well in our own careers.

Fiona: An experience like that would certainly be remembered. Could you have become an artist yourself?

Dr. Chen: My mom has a B.S. degree in music, but I failed to inherit the talents from her. I enjoy art and music, but I don’t want to pretend to be an expert.

Fiona: Your research covers the areas of embedded systems, memory and sensing, nano-devices, etc. Which topic do you think has the potential of making the largest impact?

Dr. Chen: As computer engineers, my wife and I have started gaining attentions for our research on emerging memory technologies. We recently shifted to brain-inspired computing, which is believed to revolutionize the computer industry by allowing computer to “think” like a human being. We are still far from this ultimate goal, but we have already seen light above the horizon. I’d like to use the following sentence to summarize our research: “I imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the difference between humanity and technology fades, where the soul and silicon chip unite.” (Raymond Kurzweil, “The Age of Intelligent Machines”)