Guanxiong Liu - ECE PhD Student of the Month - June 2022
Guanxiong Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Helen and John C. Hartmann Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He works under the advisory of Professor Abdallah Khreishah in the area of machine learning security which covers adversarial machine learning, neural network Trojan attack & defense, and federated learning security.
What attracted you to NJIT?
When looking for a doctoral program, the advisor and project are always important considerations. When I was searching for potential opportunities for my PhD study, NJIT gave me a deep impression about its fast growth. It is hard to ignore its newly organized Data Science department and the growing number of new coming faculties with different backgrounds. When I narrowed down my search to specific faculty members, I was really shocked by deep and cross-disciplinary cooperation between faculty members. All of these made me believe that joining NJIT was a brilliant choice for me.
What do you think would be an impactful move in your research area?
When I joined the research group under Professor Abdallah Khreishah, he immediately connected me with my co-advisor, Doctor Issa Khalil, from Qatar Computing Research Institute. Together, we started the research of the emerging cross-disciplinary topic about machine learning security. The fact is that the research community of machine learning security is growing quickly in recent years with the development of machine learning technologies and its integration into real-world applications.
What are some of the most mesmerizing moments during your time in the ECE Department and at NJIT?
There are two things that have left deep impressions on me in these years. The first is the moment that my paper was accepted by the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. I can still remember the three-day conference that gave me countless opportunities to communicate with the top tier researchers all over the world. The second exciting moment is the day we successfully built the edge aided surveillance system in NJIT which gave me a valuable experience of deploying a real-world applicable system.
What do you think would be the most valuable advantage of having a PhD degree?
Getting a PhD degree is far more than acquiring knowledge. Most of the time, as a PhD student, we are facing an unknown area. As a result, it is not a surprise that the PhD student's research is full of failures. From my perspective, in addition to the success during the PhD study, it is also important to learn how to keep enthusiasm and move forward after a failure.
Academic research skills can often be different from the needs of industrial employers. Please share your experience of searching for non-academic jobs.
As a PhD student, we should be confident in our research area. We should know the industrial employers who are actively seeking people with skills that we keep polishing during the research. With that in mind, our reach-out is more targeted and will be more likely to get a response.