I was born in Chengdu, a beautiful city in Sichuan, China. My parents gave me the name "Xueyuan", which in Chinese means a person with a lot of knowledge. Before coming to Yale, I received the M.Phil. degree in Electronic Engineering from City University of Hong Kong, in 2007, and the B.E. degree in Communication and Information Engineering from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, in 2005, respectively.

In my spare time, I spend some time reading, writing, and playing basketball. Of course, I like playing with computer hardware, which is one of my favorite leisure activities. I can still remember my first machine with 4 MByte memory and 500 MByte Quantum hard drive. Try overclocking the Cyrix CPU to run some “big” DOS programs was my pride among friends then, although companies with those names were all gone many years ago… I am also interested in computer software. I am in charge of maintaining the website for Association of Chinese Students & Scholars at Yale. This is a good chance to learn Mambo and play with it. I am considering developing some interesting applications with my friends, too. I wish I could find some extra time for that. Maybe next year?

Recently, I have developed some small Add-Ins of Windows Excel for Prof Eric Denardo's optimization course, in both VBA and AppleScript. The Add-Ins and the instructions can be found here.

Most Recently, I am writing some scripts in Maya to automatically generate 3D models of various scenes, such as the undersea world and the solar system, based on procedure methods. Here are some example images: a cartoon-look squirrel, the Earth, the Saturn, and the solar system. Aren't they cool? Here is an animation of the solar system. I wrote some Matlab programs to generate the texture (via Perlin noise). For the remaining part, I wrote MEL scripts to generate the geometry and animation. This work is totally uncorrelated to my research and I enjoyed myself here too.

I was lucky to meet Lu in high school, who became my dear wife many years later. The wedding ceremony was held on June 28, 2008. Click here to see the photo album.

My Friends (in alphabetical order)

• Lev Reyzin, Yahoo! Research.
• Yitong Yin, Nanjing University, China.
• Jun Zheng, The University of Texas at Austin.
• TBA-