Li Jiahe
24’ Computer Engineering
01 Learning, Accumulating and Striving for Excellence
Li Jiahe's father was a 90’ graduate of Zhejiang University, and she once followed her father to attend the 20th anniversary reunion of his graduation from Zhejiang University and from then on, she had a dream of becoming an alumna with her father. In the summer of 2020, Li Jiahe received the offer letter from Zhejiang University as she had wished for, "You will share the honorable title of 'ZJU Member' with many brilliant names in history, and jointly undertake the responsibility of serving national rejuvenation and promoting human progress", the words on the letter have been deeply imprinted in Li Jiahe's mind since then, inspiring her to keep breaking through forward. She said, "From that moment on, my life has been forever engraved with the mark of 'ZJU Member'."
▲ Li Jiahe and her father at Yuquan Campus, ZJU
"Interest" is the beginning of Li Jiahe's destiny with computer engineering. In the process of preparing for the informatics competition in her first year of high school, she gradually discovered the joy of computer engineering, enjoyed the process of breaking through one problem after another, and strengthened her determination to enter this field. Learning from interest is undoubtedly happy and efficient. During the four years, Li Jiahe had excellent grades, with a GPA of 3.93, ranked first in her discipline, and was twice awarded the National Scholarship and once the Zhejiang Provincial Government Scholarship.
Cultivating active learning and inquiry skills is crucial in Li Jiahe's college life. She said, "Everyone's knowledge base and future plans are at variance, so everyone's focus will be different in terms of course learning. According to our own interests, we can extend our knowledge on the basis of our courses and take the initiative to develop our ability to identify and solve problems, rather than just stopping at coursework and exams." Not only that, she actively discusses and exchanges with her classmates inside and outside the classroom, so as to deepen her understanding of knowledge. "My friends and I often meet up to study together and answer each other's questions, which not only makes me more proficient but also enables me to think and understand problems from different perspectives," Li Jiahe told us.
▲ Li Jiahe discussed and exchanged ideas with his classmates during the UIUC exchange program
Looking back, Li Jiahe believes that all the gains come from long-term accumulation. From coursework to research training, she appreciates that ZJUI's international and interdisciplinary engineering education and rich extracurricular practice opportunities have brought her diverse learning experiences for ability enhancement, "Here, I fully appreciate the happiness and satisfaction brought by learning from interest. ZJUI's all-English teaching mode has greatly improved my ability to read English literature and opened up my vision in my professional field; at the same time, ZJUI's internationalized teaching environment and high-quality faculty team also helped me to understand the academic frontiers and innovations to a great extent, and to think about my own interests." Li Jiahe happily shared with us. Currently, she has been admitted as a PhD student in the College of Computer Science and Technology of Zhejiang University, and plans to study EEG signals, time series, epilepsy detection, etc. in the future.
02 Diligently Pursue Research and Innovation to Empower Your Future
In order to find the interested research field, Li Jiahe has been making full use of summer research programs, SRTP and other opportunities since her freshman year, exploring different research fields, and continuously accumulating research experience in order to expand her depth of thinking and breadth of knowledge. During the summer vacation of her freshman year, Li Jiahe took the initiative to contact Prof. Liu Jian of the College of Computer Science and Technology of Zhejiang University and applied for summer research program in Prof. Liu's cyberspace security lab on Yuquan Campus. As the only undergraduate student in the group, Li Jiahe gained a lot from reading literature and participating in group discussions with his seniors. "ZJUI has provided us with very rich opportunities for research, allowing us to explore a wide range of research areas since our freshman year and helping us to identify our interests early. The process is not always smooth, but don't be afraid to try new things and make mistakes in practice. It is through these experiences that we can hone our research literacy and enrich our resumes."
After returning from her exchange program at UIUC, Li Jiahe joined Prof. Yang Yang's lab at the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University. During the process, she published papers as the second author for students in the top conference in data mining field, Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2023), and the top conference in deep learning field, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024). In the paper Accelerating Dynamic Network Embedding with Billions of Parameter Updates to Milliseconds, due to the extensive mathematical derivation involved in the research work, which appeared obscure and difficult to understand, Li Jiahe decided to abstract the algorithm and adopted the spatial projection method, namely the rotation and scaling of coordinate axes. She first represents the graph as an adjacency matrix, then calculates the original matrix to obtain an embedding vector space and performs coordinate axis transformation. In this way, the computational complexity is greatly reduced, and readers can better understand the algorithm while reading the derivation process.
▲ Overview of the Dynamic Adjacency Matrix Decomposition Model
For Li Jiahe, the repeated research practices not only strengthened her exploratory spirit and academic ability, but also made her research foundation more solid.
03 Enthusiastically Volunteering to Turn a Small Light into a Flame
Inspired by the "man-machine battle" between Google's artificial intelligence system Alpha Go and South Korean player Lee Sedol, Li Jiahe founded Room78 Algorithm Competition Club in her freshman year to inspire more students to think about the relationship between algorithms and human beings. The club provides students with more practical computer science application scenarios by conducting introductory lectures such as "Introduction to Algorithms" and "Algorithm Competition", holding algorithmic problem-solving activities, and inviting professors to hold algorithmic academic lectures, etc. The club helps students master and apply algorithmic knowledge and improve computational thinking and logical thinking skills. In the academic year 2020-2021, Li was recognized by the Youth League Committee of Zhejiang University as the "Pioneer of Social Work" at the university level, making her the only new club chairman on the International Campus to receive this honor. "For me, this is not only an honor, but also an affirmation for all the participants of our entire club." Li Jiahe shared with us. The club, affectionately nicknamed "Planet R78", has been popular among students. Under the leadership of Li Jiahe, the Club is making great strides forward in terms of its size, influence, and its member vitality.
▲ Li Jiahe participated in the oral defense of the clubs’ annual work of the International Campus
In addition to organizing clubs, Li Jiahe was also actively involved in volunteer services. In 2015, Li Jiahe, who was still in the first year of junior school, joined the Shandong Museum Youth Volunteer Service Team and served as a volunteer interpreter in the Xia-Shang -Zhou Dynasties Hall of the Shandong History and Culture Exhibition. Even during her year of senior high school, she has been insisting on using her spare time to serve in the museum. During her college years, she made full use of her vacation time to continue to volunteer in the museum, with a total of more than 300 volunteer hours, and was once awarded as a five-star volunteer of Zhejiang University. Her many years of experience in volunteer interpretation has made her realize the sense of achievement and happiness of helping others. She believes that museums are the gathering place of ancient and modern civilizations, and her contribution becomes more special and meaningful when she can spread the excellent culture through her.
▲ Li Jiahe served as a volunteer interpreter in the Xia-Shang–Zhou Dynasties Hall of the Shandong History and Culture Exhibition.
Suggestions for ZJUIers
1. Please be clear about your launching point and avoid blind anxiety when you are pursuing a goal. Academic performance, research, competitions and social activities often cannot be taken care of at the same time, but just having two or three outstanding highlights is enough to make you stand out. Therefore, you are highly recommended to self-reflect from time to time, think about our strengths and plan ahead.
2. Please be brave to try and continuously enrich your CV. ZJUI provides you with first-class multidisciplinary engineering education and rich research practice training, you should make full use of these platforms and opportunities to try various fields in order to find the direction of your interest. In this process, the most important thing is not to be afraid of making mistakes and failures. The only way to continuously improve your research literacy and research ability is to keep making trial and error in practice.
