For a long time, I didn’t update my blog in English. So, this is a good chance to reveal some stories about me here. First of all, a new semester – spring 2008 – has started. In this semester, I plan to take three courses, but they are still uncertain. The tentative courses are (1) Information Integration on Web, (2) Analysis of Algorithm, and (3) Database System Interoperability.

The first course is an interesting one since I will learn how to use various web sites as resources and design an application utilizing those resources. Creating a travel planning web site, for example, requires handful resources from internet including flight information, tourist attraction information, and weather information. Then, I will learn how to integrate information together and build my own application on top of them.

The second course which is a required course is Analysis of Algorithm. It is the tough one since it requires a lot of thinking and mathematic. And, the third one is about databases and information. In short, in this semester, I will acquire an intensive wisdom in information as I desire.

Another progress here is that I have got a job. In this semester, I am working for ISI or Information Science Institute. It is one of USC’s research institutes and has a lot of brilliant professors working there. My working group do research about knowledge extraction from discussion boards and use NLP or Natural Language Processing to extract patterns from a discussion thread. I think this will be a good opportunity for me to learn some technology, may be do some research while I can earn money to help my parent.

I think those are all interesting stories of my life here now. In fact, I ran into an interesting topic in computer science which I would like to share with others so much. I will write about “The Semantic Web” in the upcoming blog.