When Xufei Wang was growing up in Shandong, China, he enjoyed “disassembling everything I could get, checking what was inside, and failing to assemble it back together.”
His childhood interests led him to pursue an engineering career. After earning a B.S. in Internet of Things at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, he came to Case Western Reserve University to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering. Recently, he defended his Ph.D. thesis, “Time Serials Data Processing with Neural Networks: From Classification to Decision Making.”
While preparing his thesis, Wang researched the efficacy of neural networks in processing time series data, mainly through the lens of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and Congestion Control (CC). His study was anchored in the detailed exploration of fundamental neural architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and advanced reinforcement learning techniques underpinning the subsequent application-specific innovations.
Wang decided to come to CWRU after hearing about Associate Professor Pan Li’s research in the fields of network science and economics, energy systems, security and privacy, and big data, such as machine learning, large-scale data analytics and computing, healthcare, and social networks. Looking back on his time as a Ph.D. student, he is most proud of having papers accepted for publication and feeling that publications had acknowledged his research.
After Wang graduates, he plans to start a career in industry. “I would like to catch the state-of-the-art technology, understand and recreate it, and bring my ideas to the real world,” he said.
