The 4-day Departmental PhD Student Workshop concluded on April 25 with a party of drinks and pizza, donated by Dr. Marko Skoric and Prof. Jonathan Zhu (http://weblab.com.cityu.edu.hk/blog/project/workshops/). “Beyond the drinks and pizza, we will also be missing the food for thoughts provided in the four days,” several participants reflected on the workshop, which is the largest of the kind in scale and duration in the department (visit http://www.cityu.edu.hk/com/Page_Frame.aspx?type=news&id=182 to see a list of previous workshops). A total of 41 participants took part in the event, including 25 PhD students, 6 faculty members, and 9 visiting scholars. The event even attracted a few outside guests, including a faculty member from another university, when the news of the in-house workshop got out through word of mouth.

 

 

As a more distinctive feature, the workshop was conducted of the students, by the students, and for the students, with contributions from four final-year PhD students, including Hai Liang (on data collection), Zhenzhen Wang (on data preprocessing), Chengjun Wang (on data analysis), and Qin Jie (on data visualization).

 

All participants felt exhausted, after the fast-paced intensive training, but excited and inspired by the new insights, new opportunities and new tools offered by the workshop for groundbreaking research in the field. Many of them look forward additional training on advanced topics in big data, computational social science, and social network analysis.

 

Jonathan Zhu