For prospective students
This post is for those who would like to join our lab and work on cyber-physical systems (CPS) at National Taiwan Normal University, in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering.
Undergraduate research opportunity
At NCL, the undergraduate research projects are designed to serve either of the following purposes:
- To assist students in exploring topics in which they have strong interests.
- To have students assist in some projects that we’re working on in the lab.
In either case, we call for self-motivated spirits.
Master program
A CS master program is a two-year training in completing a reasonably sized research project. Master students should work largely independently, though we will have weekly individual meeting and group meeting to exchange ideas. In our lab, we emphasize hands-on experience in systems research, meaning that students will have ample opportunities to design, analyze, build, test, and evaluate their prototype CPS systems.
Compared with the undergraduate eduation, where students spend most of their time learning the knowns, the graduate education is more about exploring the unknowns and learning to articulate their findings. In science and engineering, this means both the ability to compose and refine research work (as silver purified seven times) and the ability to present and defend the result (so that the silver is made into jewelry whose value is clearly seen). At NCL, we aim to help students develop both skills.
Ph.D. program
Working for a Ph.D. degree requires much more significant effort, but it can be very rewarding. It is typically a 5–7 years of concentration on a real, open, and important research problem.
On this journey, the student will gradually build up a unique view to an intellectual question in his field of study, and such a view will be framed into a theory and a system that he must be able to thoroughly evaluate and articulate in a formal manner. That is why the full name of Ph.D. is Doctor of Philosophy.
Like planting, the job of a research advisor for graduate students is to provide resource and guidance along the way, in the hope that those who decided to take on this journey may bear much fruits someday.