Yang Deng - ECE PhD Student of the Month - July 2022
Yang Deng is a PhD candidate supervised by Prof. Tao Han at UNICS Lab in the ECE Department at NJIT. Prior to NJIT, he was a research assistant at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research interests include 5G/6G network resource management, edge computing, blockchain, and machine learning.
What do you think would be an impactful move in your research area?
I believe that integrating machine learning methods to automate network resource management and using blockchain to build a more scalable, accessible, and secure mobile network would be some impactful moves to construct the next-generation mobile network.
What is a mesmerizing moment during your time so far in the ECE Department at NJIT?
The first ECE PhD contest is one of the mesmerizing moments. I would like to talk about my moment at the event. I guess nobody noticed how fast my heart was beating then. Personally, I have never been a fan of judging others or being judged but this kind of interaction is inevitable in certain scenarios. Therefore, I was hesitating whether I should attend because you know, in my mind, another contest. Eventually, I persuaded myself to show up at least for my favorite food, pizza. Surprisingly, my attitude changed after the keynotes from Prof. Misra and Prof. Wang. They together convinced me that this would be fun and this was not a contest at all. It turned out that I indeed got to know more about my colleagues and had a great time.
Where do you hope to see yourself after graduation?
I hope to keep being curious as an observer and open-minded as a researcher. I hope my current and future research can really benefit people no matter where they come from and how much they get paid hourly. I hope to contribute what I learned to inspiring the next generation, my local community would be a good start. I also hope to take better care of my family.
Please share your experience on transferring your study to New Jersey from another state.
It is actually a special experience in my PhD study. During the first month since we moved to the new lab at NJIT, the department, my advisor, and my lab mates, everybody was working hard to put our new lab together. I really appreciate the help from all people around. Besides, I would like to share one lovely moment when I walked into one of the classrooms in FMH. I sat down in the center of the room and the AC was strong. I couldn’t stop thinking about my first class in the States as a PhD student a while ago. Nothing but the famous questions come into my mind - Where do I come from? Who am I? Where am I going?