Today, let me call you, my dear "The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)", as my "alma mater", for the first time in my life. For the past two years, the most thing I ever do except do research, sleep, eat, and work out, is to satirize you, my dear HKUST, as there are researchers who do not do research, teachers who do not teach, students who do not study, and professors who are not professional. I usually teased you with my colleagues as you don't even have a university motto, so we always said "making money and making love (MMAML in short, sounds like a top computer science conference, multi-media and machine learning)" is our university motto, and say you are a soulless university. Now, at the end of the story, I am reviewing every detail since the first day I was a student here.
My research journey is not flat, the two main parts of my research, reinforcement learning and multi-agent systems, do not even have any related course here. The most of time, I have to learn by myself without any feedback, even though I finished 40 credits in the first and half years, which may make history in HKUST but is somehow useless to boost my research. After one year's struggle, I started to have a linear improvement in my research as it start to converge on some points after long-term cumulative learning. After that, I talked to other state-of-the-art researchers and stay foolish and hungry so I can boost my research exponentially day by day. At the end of the third semester, things got better and better, and I believe I could have some notable results in my work.
I don't want to review too much about my hardship, just like in planning (which is a research area), diving too deep purely into uncertainty itself is useless as you can not skip it by studying it. At least, all the hardship is reasonable and worthy to me, and I do appreciate it. Also, I appreciate more that I am working with my supervisor Fangzhen Lin as he gave me the total freedom to pick my research area and support me as much as he can all the time. I also want to give my great thanks to the taxpayers in China, who support my two-year scholarship. Sometimes, I can not sleep very well, thinking of the people and taxpayers supporting me, and feeling depressed that I do not have any notable work at the beginning of my career.
All in all, I am not a traditional Chinese student as I don't believe anything if there are no concrete reasons, I don't take anything for granted in any case, and I have my own principles. Now, in the end, if you ask me, do you find the motto of HKUST? It is hard to say. But I can say that, whether this university has a motto does not matter at all, and whether this university has its soul does not matter at all. It is we to define the university, but not the university that defines us. When I witnessed some facts like professor Lei Chen running 10 km every day, professor Shuai Wang doing real SOTA research and caring about his students, and my supervisor professor Fangzhen Lin still coding and publishing first-author papers at the age of 60s, I do believe these things matter more than whether this university has its motto or soul. Now here comes my turn, as a somewhat non-submissive guy, a non-typical Chinese researcher, a simple man who wants to keep his realness as much as possible, a west-coast (more specifically, California) academically gangster, to graduate here.
There is no need for too many congratulations on me as I always stay alone, work alone, and find my power from loneliness, and I get used to it. (I don't do solo work all the time, I do talk to other SOTA researchers.)
Here I leave, but I believe there are many and more people like me or better than me coming here, replacing those researchers who do not have the guts to do research anymore, those teachers who do not care about students' future, those students who do not deserve their scholarships, those professors who can not lead people. Those better people will come with simple minds, warm hearts, pure love for science, respect for the truth, and high-level intelligence, to create something new, to participate, to understand, to change, to keep going forward, and to create a better future for my alma mater, the Hong Kong Univerisity of Science and Technology!