I officially joined Lancaster University on 8th April this year as a senior research associate on TAS-S. I had just completed my Ph.D. study at the University of Exeter where I stayed for 5 years, since the first time I came to the UK to study (MSc and PhD). I feel super excited that I landed myself a research post in computer science and am so lucky to have received a lot of support through the transition. Everyone has been so friendly. With their kind help, I am gradually finding my feet in this new role.
Although I started this new job in a pandemic, and haven’t yet had a chance to meet my colleagues face-to-face, I have met each member of the project online and have daily virtual catchups with my teammates. I am thoroughly enjoying all the academic debates and discussions with my mentors and fellow researchers. Just recently, we have planned to design a federated meta-learning framework for autonomous system (AS) to cope with the heterogeneity of AS, aiming to accelerate the learning process and enhance the adaptiveness to new environments. The traditional federated learning can only develop a common output for all nodes. During my PhD., I focused on the federated learning based proactive content caching schemes for wireless networks, to alleviate backhaul network burden, improve cache performance, and reduce privacy and security risks. My research interests are also to develop an efficient federated learning framework for AS.
I am full of hope for my new research project, which will allow me to gain invaluable research experience and training under guided mentorship. Meanwhile, I will become more familiar with an academic life, as an early career researcher, which is so different from being a PhD student.
On a personal note, I relocated to Lancaster three months ago. During this period, my kind colleagues helped me to familiarise with this beautiful city and recommended a number of wonderful places to visit (e.g., Heysham, Chester, Lake District, etc). I am looking forward to visiting these places, especially the Lake District (Bowness, Windermere, and Ambleside). I am really enjoying my lovely time in Lancaster.