Statement of Purpose

It is a Statement of Purpose for applying Georgia Tech Ph.D. program.

Statement of Purpose

In the recent decade, I witnessed how computer science technology matures, producing thousands of applications that benefit ordinary people’s everyday life. However, the disabled who called for more help didn’t benefit much from computer science because most stakeholders don’t think this can make a profit. Most of them can’t use phones or computers like us and still live a traditional life under traditional rehabilitation, so I am thinking of helping these disabled with new tech.

I volunteered at a local disabled’s foundation for about six years. I have seen how difficult for disabled children to learn speaking and writing. Usually, teachers must repeat new words hundreds of times so that these kids can gradually learn how to pronounce and spell them. Although teachers and parents love these kids deeply, they commonly feel exhausted and even complain about kids. That’s why most of these children are unconfident and depressed. Such emotional hurt can be addressed by building a chatting robot that can translate the disabled between natural language and sign language so that we can communicate with the disabled more fluently. Therefore, I am passionate about NLP and machine learning to recognize natural language, images, sounds, and videos.

I expect to receive a Bachelor of Science in Computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in May 2023. While pursuing my bachelor’s degree, I equipped myself with more computer science knowledge and dived into fields I was interested in. What distinguishes the Georgia Tech Computer Science Ph.D. program is it also includes other related fields, like EECS, robotics, or information schools, which allows us to draft a unique plan individually. I am especially interested in Prof. XX’s research as his research fields are close to mine, and his articles impressed me.

I took a three-semester (15-month) research at school and expected to contribute two more semesters. Under Prof. James H. McClellan and Dr. Greg Krudysz, I came to know Natural Language Processing and researched models, libraries, and how to interpret data. The beginning was always hard when I was confused about all while others seemed already know. Then, I researched the models and concepts from websites myself ranging from articles, source code, and videos, and communicated with seniors in the group. In this way, I continuously advance my knowledge and make sure to contribute to the group.

The research course, called Intelligent Tutoring System, mainly asked us to build and research products that can educate students outsides of schools. My group is developing a chatbot that can answer students’ questions based on the resources provided, such as slides and textbooks. We explored enhancing the accuracy of the chatbot and added new features this semester. Using textbook data and SQuAD 2.0 format, we constructed a dataset of the textbook, and it extracted questions and answers. After that, we fine-tuned a pre-trained Q&A model using the dataset and observed an accuracy increase.

Throughout the research, I was impressed with how machines understand natural language and considered the possibility that they can understand sign language for the disabled.

In lectures, I studied how the agents “learn” recursively from a large block of data to find optimal value or policy and observed how parameters like learning rate and probabilities changes would alter the action of learning agents. I practiced graph search, reinforcement learning, Bayesian network, and Neural Networks in course projects. At the end of class, we learned deep learning image processing using multiple layers, which can help us read sign language.

In artificial intelligence, I see a purposeful and versatile vocation, yet what I love most is its fusion of scientific core and ethical rules with constructive applications that efficiently benefit people. Volunteering at the local Disabled Persons’ Federation first inspired me to concentrate on artificial intelligence. It anticipates me to continue to do research after my Ph.D. graduation to advance disabled’s living. Although frustration may happen, I trust I can overcome obstacles and stay exploring the fields as I am eagle to help the disabled and can’t wait to engage in research on artificial intelligence.