iQua Research Group

In academia, except for the “advisor,” team members come and go (not unlike peer-to-peer networks!). In the hope that graduated alumni of the iQua research group find their experiences helpful to their professional career, we record their footsteps in this page, featuring profiles of selected iQua alumni who we still kept in touch with. When in Toronto, do come back and visit us from time to time.

For those who are not profiled, we at least record their last-known affiliations, and the year we last updated them. Contact us to say hello when you happen to run into this page, and let us include your profile here.

Postdoctoral fellows: Tara Small (2006)

Ph.D. graduates: Chuan Wu (2008) — Mea Wang (2008) — Jiang Guo (2007) — Ying Zhu (2006) — Weihong Wang (2005) — Zongpeng Li (2005)

M.A.Sc. graduates: Xinyu Zhang (2007) — Kevin Yuen (2006) — Selwyn Yuen (2004)

Our alumni without profiles: Karen H. Wang (graduated 2001) — Jilei Liu (2002) — Edmond Poon (2002) — Shahid Bashir (2002) — Gregory Hartl (2004) — Xin Zhou (2004)

Tara Small, Postdoctoral Fellow, August 2005 — July 2006

Tara was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the group for one year, co-supervised by Professor Ben Liang.

Tara studied Mathematics and Physics as an undergraduate at the University of New Brunswick, earning the Governor General’s medal for highest standing at the university at her graduation in 2000. In graduate school at Cornell University, Tara concentrated on Applied Mathematics, earning her M.S. in January 2004. With the support of an O’Brien Foundation Fellowship, she completed her Ph.D. dissertation the next year and received her Ph.D. degree in August 2005.

Tara’s PhD thesis project involved research into wireless delay-tolerant networking applying to whale communication. She has developed the Shared Wireless Infostation Model (SWIM), a networking model that gathers information from whale tags and transmits this information to collection stations efficiently. Some of her published works on this topic include “The Shared Wireless Infostation Model — A New Ad Hoc Networking Paradigm (or Where there is a Whale, there is a Way),” published at ACM MobiHoc ‘03, a chapter in “Handbook of Sensor Networks,” a book from CRC Press published in July 2004, and “A New Networking Model for Biological Applications of Ad Hoc Sensor Networks,” appeared in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking in April 2006.

While at iQua, Tara extended her research work to scalable peer-to-peer networks. She used her mathematical background to devise methods to improve multimedia streaming in these overlay networks. Using techniques from randomized algorithms and optimization, Tara designed methods for media-content providers to serve high-quality streaming to network nodes without overwhelming provider cost. Among others, her papers are published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and accepted as a full paper in ACM Multimedia 2006.

After Tara concluded her work at iQua, she enjoyed a four-month excursion in Europe (must be great without paper deadlines!), and then returned to Canada and started working as a research scientist for the Federal Government of Canada. Let’s just say that she has continued to do the research that she loves to do, as always.

Chuan Wu, Ph.D., July 2008

Chuan is now a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong. She joined the iQua research group on September 2004. Her research interests include performance optimization and measurement studies of large-scale peer-to-peer streaming systems.

As the third Tsinghua alumni in iQua (after Zongpeng and Weihong), Chuan has received her B.Engr. degree and M.Engr. degree in 2000 and 2002, respectively, from the Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. After 2002, she has worked in the Information Technology industry as a software designer and developer for two years, before she started pursuing her Ph.D. studies.

Mea Wang, Ph.D., April 2008

Mea is now a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary. She joined the iQua research group in 2002, after receiving her Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) degree with first-class honour from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has completed her Master of Applied Science degree under the NSERC PGS A award in 2004, and has been awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship in 2005 and the NSERC PGS D award in 2006.

Mea is interested in designing and building overlay and peer-to-peer protocols that work well in reality. Her Master’s thesis research has been on the design and implementation of a fully distributed and resource-efficient algorithm to deliver complex services, by federating primitive services in overlay and peer-to-peer networks. Her PhD thesis is on her work on Crystal, a scalable framework for rapid peer-to-peer protocol development and testing in the server cluster setting. Her research interests also include the application of network coding, especially in the peer-to-peer streaming case.

Jiang Guo, Ph.D., September 2007

Jiang graduated from the group with a PhD degree in September 2007, and now working in Toronto at Telephoto Technologies Inc. Jiang received his B.Engr. in 1997 in Automatic Control from Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China, and his M.Engr. degree in 2000 in Computer Science from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China.

Jiang’s research interests are in the areas of networking and distributed systems. Particularly, he is interested in designing distributed application-layer algorithms and protocols, by applying microeconomic theory and game theory to the analysis of node behavior in peer-to-peer networks. He has published a number of papers in the area. As a hands-on experimentalist, he has also made important contributions to the first implementation of iOverlay, a lightweight middleware framework for rapid development and testing of overlay algorithms.

Ying Zhu, Ph.D., August 2006

Ying graduated from the group with a PhD degree in August 2006, at which time she joined the Faculty of Business and Information Technology, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. While in the group, she was interested in designing decentralized algorithms to improve the performance of overlay network topologies. Since 2004, she considered linear capacity constraints among overlay links as first-class entities, with one of her papers winning the Best Student Paper Award at the 13th International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS 2005), held in Passau, Germany. In 2003, she did some pioneering work on the use of network coding in overlay networks, leading to her paper published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

Before she joined the iQua group, she has received her B.A.Sc. in computer sicence and mathematics from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and M.A.Sc. in computer science from University of Toronto in 1999 and 2001, respectively.

While she is not reading a book on NP Completeness, she enjoys listening to music, attending live concerts of classical music and jazz, and reading non-academic books. She also loves to go to the latest movies, go skiing, play badminton, and travel to Europe. Her life is much beyond papers — a strategic decision in the right direction.

Weihong Wang, Ph.D., October 2005

Weihong graduated from the iQua research group with a PhD degree in October 2005. During her tenure, she has studied the problem of resource allocation in peer-to-peer networks using games, microeconomics, markets, and machine learning. She is now working at HP Labs China. Not surprisingly, she has published several research papers, and she is quite proud of her work published in IEEE INFOCOM 2005, IEEE IWQoS 2003, as well as the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

A bit of a background about Weihong before her fun days in Toronto. From 1993 to 1998, Weihong has been an undergraduate student with a major in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Applied Mathematics at Tsinghua University, P.R. China. She received her M.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua university in 2001, with research and development experiences in power system control and flexible AC transmission systems.

Despite the seriousness of her personal web site, Weihong enjoys endless weekend parties with lots of friends around the university. While she is not running her Matlab simulation scripts or decorating her LCD display at work, she loves to get athletic and run long distances. Perhaps due to her more social personalities, she enjoys Beijing a bit more than Toronto, and that is where you will find her one of these days.

Zongpeng Li, Ph.D., August 2005

Zongpeng was a graduate from the iQua group with a PhD degree in August 2005, and was the first PhD graduate from the group. Zongpeng has been interested in the general area of computer networks, with an algorithmic accent. In particular, he is interested in Internet algorithms, wireless ad hoc networks, multicast, network coding, game theory, queueing theory, as well network optimization based on mathematical programming, graph theory, combinatorics, and approximation algorithms.

While at iQua, he has worked on and published quite a number of very interesting papers, including two contributions in IEEE INFOCOM 2005 and one paper in the IEEE Transaction on Information Theory, all about his work on network coding in undirected networks. In August 2005, he joined the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. He has been active in the field ever since, with his co-authored work on scalable streaming for heterogeneous clients in ACM Multimedia 2006 as a full paper, as well as his single-author work on min-cost multicast of selfish information flows in IEEE INFOCOM 2007 as a full paper.

Before he joined the group, Zongpeng received his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1999, and his M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Toronto in 2001.

While not proving theorems, Zongpeng has been a hobbyist of Go (the board game), and aspire to drive good cars (such as the turbocharged Audi A4). Well, with the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, we recommend him an SUV.

Xinyu Zhang, M.A.Sc., June 2007

Xinyu has graduated with a M.A.Sc. degree in June 2007 from the group, with a thesis titled “Drift: a Highly Condensed Emulation Framework for Mobile Nodes in Server Clusters.” He has previously studied in the Department of Electronic and Communications Engineering in the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, and received his B.Eng. degree there with honors in July 2005. During his undergraduate years, Xinyu worked on various embedded system projects, such as “The Control Instrument for UCA Synthesizing Process,” “The Hypoids Pipeline Robot” (which won second prize in the Challenge Cup), “The Automobile Electronic Air-conditioner Based on FFMC-8L Microcontroller” and “The Platform for Automobile Rainwiper Testing.” His undergraduate thesis, which won an Excellent Thesis Award at the Harbin Institute of Technology, focused on the design patterns for microcontroller system software.

Xinyu has continued to work in the iQua group as a full-time Research Technician in the 2007-2008 academic year. His research interests during this period focused on the application of network coding in wireless networks, as well as the development and use of cluster-based emulation platforms for large-scale wireless networks. He is currently a graduate student working towards his Ph.D. degree at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, under the supervision of Professor Kang Shin.

Kevin Yuen, M.A.Sc., April 2006

Kevin received his M.A.Sc. degree in April 2006, officially becoming an iQua alumni. Kevin is co-supervised by Professor Ben Liang. He received the B.A.Sc. (Honours) degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2004. In his undergraduate design project, Kevin worked in a group to develop speculative parallelization for OpenMP compilers.

In Fall 2004, Kevin joined the iQua research group, and undertook challenging research problems in designing efficient distributed algorithms in wireless networks. Particularly, he was interested in applying optimization techniques to achieve energy-efficient data gathering in sensor networks. The objective was to find the optimal transmission structure on the network graph and the optimal rate allocation on the sensor nodes, while considering the effect of non-ideal data aggregation and wireless channel interference simultaneously. Kevin’s work has led to two conference papers (ICC and Networking 2006), as well as a journal paper, accepted with minor revisions to the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

Kevin is now working at the IBM Toronto Laboratories in Markham, Ontario, as a software developer. He is currently in the process of applying for admission into a medical school, a dramatic change of course in his career.

Selwyn Yuen, M.A.Sc., January 2004

Selwyn graudated from the iQua research group and received his M.A.Sc. in January 2004. He received a B.A.Sc. degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2002, graduating on the Dean’s Honour List. While at iQua, his research focus was to apply game theory and mechanism design to solve some interesting problems in networking, including ad hoc network formation and overlay multicast tree construction. His research on the latter problem also led to a IEEE INFOCOM 2005 paper and a journal paper that appeared in ACM/Kluwer Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET).

Since his graduation, Selwyn worked briefly as an a technology consultant before joining Scotia Capital as a credit derivatives associate, where his knowledge of modelling, optimizations, probability, and stochastic process were put to good use. He left Scotia Capital after two years, and is currently working at Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as a Quantitative Analyst, in the area of portfolio management.

In his spare time, Selwyn enjoys playing badminton, travelling, and watching (GREAT!) movies.

Our alumni without profiles

Karen Huan Wang (September 1999 — September 2001): M.A.Sc. thesis on “Mobility-based Clustering and Partition Prediction in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” last known at Intel Corporation, San Diego, California (2005), test failed on November 2006 — email to intel.com bounced. Personal broadcast message to Karen: get back to us!

Jilei (Jennie) Liu (September 2000 — September 2002): M.A.Sc. thesis on “Power-aware Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” last known at the Bank of Montreal, Toronto, Ontario (February 2009).

Edmond Poon (September 2000 — September 2002): M.A.Sc. thesis on “Fair Scheduling and Power-aware Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” last known at Dr Robot, Inc., Markham, Ontario (2003). Personal broadcast message to Edmond: get back to us!

Shahid Bashir (September 2000 — September 2002): M.A.Sc. thesis on “QoS-aware Service Discovery Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” last known at Ontario Power Generation, Pickering, Ontario (December 2006).

Gregory Hartl (September 2002 — August 2004): M.A.Sc. thesis on “On the Use of Data Inference for Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks,” last known at Workbrain, Inc., Toronto, Ontario (July 2006).

Xin Zhou (September 2001 — September 2004): M.A.Sc. thesis on “iFlow and Beyond: Bandwidth-Efficient and Delay-Aware Information Access in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” last known at Protractor Software Inc., Toronto, Ontario (March 2007).