日期: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:51:21 +0800
寄件者: "Kun-Mao Chao"
收件者: meeting@acb
主旨: Re: Aloha from Kun-Mao in Sanya

Dear Partners,

Aloha from Kun-Mao in Sanya, Hainan, China. I'm attending ISAAC 2005 with
Chih-Huai and Kuan-Yu. Chih-Huai just gave a wonderful presentation this
morning. This afternoon, together with Tien Ching (DT's student), we took a
short break to visit some sightseeing spots in Sanya. It has been a very
exciting event for all of us. Unbelievable and unforgettable!

In this conference, we met a few old friends, and got to know some new
friends. Moreover, we have listened to quite a few interesting talks that
would inspire our future research in many ways.

As mentioned by Prof. Frances F. Yao in her keynote speech, fundamental
tools developed by theoretical computer scientists are found to be useful
over and over again in new contexts. I totally agree with her point of view
on the trend of current algorithmic problems. Another keynote speaker
Mihalis Yannakakis introduced the model of Recursive Markov Chain (RMC), and
related this topic with the Galton-Watson Branching Procedure (1874), and
the stochastic context-free grammars (196x). He also applied combinatorial,
algebraic and numerical techniques to this new model, and derived several
interesting results.

We are now in an era of tons of computational problems arising from all
sorts of the applications of information technology. Let's always try our
best to locate well-motivated problems, and propose genuine solutions for
them. To increase your competitive edge, you should have a broad view of the
problem that you're working on, and of course, you should also be familiar
with the techniques used to solve its related problems.

A possible procedure for locating a research problem might be as follows.

Step 1: Choose a research topic to work on.

Step 2: Locate important fundamental problems in that topic. You should be
very familiar with these problems and their state-of-the-art solutions.

Step 3: Get a problem, old or new, to work on, and set up your goal.

Step 4: Day-and-Night; Night-and-Day… (I hope you won't get into an
infinite loop here. ^_^)

By interplaying between the problems and techniques, we'll get rich theory,
and ask intriguing algorithmic questions. Wish you all have a great research
journey.

Happy Holidays,
Kun-Mao
--
Kun-Mao Chao (趙坤茂)
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering
National Taiwan University
Taipei 106, Taiwan

From: "Yao-Ting Huang"
To: Kun-Mao Chao
Sent: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:11:12 +0800
Subject: Re: Aloha from Kun-Mao in Sanya

Dear Prof. Chao,

Glad to hear that you all have a wonderful time.
You could leave those words on the wall of our lab.=)

Cheers,
Yao-Ting

日期: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:24:13 +0800
寄件者: "Kun-Mao Chao"
收件者: meeting@acb
主旨: Fw: Re: Aloha from Kun-Mao in Sanya

Dear Yao-Ting,

Thanks for your real-time reply. Let's all leave those words on our minds. :-)

Good night,
Kun-Mao