iQua Research Group

Jiahua Wu

Jiahua received his B.Engr. degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering in Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China. Just after that, in September 2007, he joined the iQua group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and now he is a second-year graduate student towards a M.A.Sc. degree.

Jiahua earned a highly competitive spot to become the top ten among the over 90,000 students who took part in the College Entrance Examination in Shanghai in 2003. Then he got the chance to study in one of the best EE programs in China. His undergraduate studies mainly focused on the field of signal processing and communication systems and he got exceptional grades in his courses. As part of his undergraduate research experience, he worked on several projects, such as “Digital circuit design in an RFID system”, “FPGA application project based on Xilinx Spartan-II.” His bachelor thesis research was on the topic of pilot-symbol-aided channel estimation in OFDM systems.

In the master phase, his research interests are in the analysis and algorithm design in peer-assisted video-on-demand (VoD) systems. In particular, his research focuses on the quality and performance improvement in large-scale peer-assisted VoD systems.

Henry Xu

Henry did his undergraduate work in Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, and was awarded the B.Engr. degree with first class honour, and a minor in Business Administration in 2007. He then joined the iQua group as a first year M.A.Sc. candidate in September 2007.

In his undergraduate years, Henry achieved excellent academic performance both departmental-wide and university-wide. He was consistently placed on the Dean’s List of Faculty of Engineering and New Asia College from 2004 to 2007. His undergraduate thesis focuses on the performance of network coding in wireless peer-to-peer networks, under supervision of Professor Robert Li. Besides course work, he has also worked as a committee member of mainland undergraduate association, and did a summer internship at HP Singapore.

Zimu Liu

Zimu did his undergraduate program at the Department of Computer Science at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, P.R. China, and received his B.Engr. degree in July 2007. In September 2007, Zimu joined the iQua research group as a graduate student; and now he is working hard as a second-year student towards the M.A.Sc. degree.

During his undergraduate life, Zimu kept excellent academic records, especially in math and computer science courses and ranked top 3% in his department. Based on his solid background, Zimu worked on various programming and research projects, such as “Research and Implementation of Automatic Meta-Information Extraction for Chinese Documents without Dictionary Support” (Jiangsu Province Science Research Fund Candidate). His undergraduate thesis, which won an Excellent Thesis Award at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, focused on secure data transmission in the Internet.

Currently, his research interests focus on statistical study on the large-scale peer-to-peer applications and design of algorithms for distributed systems. In particular, he is interested in deriving insights from extensive measurements and statistical studies of real-world commercial live streaming applications, and improving performance and quality of peer-to-peer video-on-demand systems.

In his spare time, he devotes his efforts on the maintenance of iQua’s computing resources, and enjoys writing code in various scripting and programming languages.

Elias Kehdi

Elias did his undergraduate program at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his B.Engr. degree in July 2007. In September 2007, he joined the iQua research group as a first year M.A.Sc. student at the University of Toronto.

In his undergraduate, he was placed on the dean’s honor list for every semester of his program. His studies focused on networking and signal processing. Elias presented his first paper on ECG monitoring system in the 6th FEA conference at the American University of Beirut and it was nominated for best creative achievement award. He worked as a research assistant under the supervision of Professor Mazen Saghir and Professor Zaher Dawy writing a journal about the same topic of his first paper.

Elias enjoys math problems, therefore he completed a minor in mathematics.

Yuan Feng

Yuan joined the iQua research group at the University of Toronto in September 2008 as a first-year graduate student towards a M.A.Sc. degree. Yuan received her B.Engr. degree from the School of Telecommunications in Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in August 2008.

In her undergraduate years, Yuan achieved excellent academic performance, especially in mathematics and communications courses, and held the top-level scholarship (top 25 of the 5000 students in a grade) for three years. Her solid mathematical background and dedication to courses has led to a ranking of top 1 of 115 students in her major. As part of her undergraduate research experience, Yuan joined an undergraduate research project on the topic of wireless underground sensor networks. She also worked as the Vice President of her major.

Junqi Yu

Junqi joined the iQua group as a new M.A.Sc. student in September 2008, co-supervised by Professor Ben Liang. Junqi received her B.Engr. degree from the Department of Electronics and Information Engineering in Xi’an Jiaotong University, China,in July 2008.

During her undergraduate study, Junqi worked hard and showed excellent academic performance. In the third year, she was sent as one of the six students from Xi’an Jiaotong to study at Korea University. She won scholarships every year. In particular, in her third year, she was awarded the prestigious National Scholarship from the Ministry of Education in China. Her undergraduate thesis focused on page segmentation and classification of document images, when she has designed and implemented a complete page layout analysis system. Besides studying, she also did a summer internship at SK Telecom, which is the largest mobile operator in South Korea.