Sungwook Moon Ph.D. Candidate Mobile Networking Laboratory Dept. of Computer & Information Science & Engineering University of Florida
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Family Life
I have a beautiful wife and daughter I love so much. My wife and I used to go to every nice place and great restaurants in Korea and Florida. With our daughter, everything is even more fun! With our daughter being almost two, I often take her to a playground in West-side park in Gainesville usually in the morning. This gives not only the time for my wife to take a break but also precious moments for me and my daughter to remember. I wish this happiness to last forever.
Life with NOMADS group
I forgot why we call our group as NOMADS but this research lab is called as that after named one of our alumni. Our research group was previously with Univ. of Southern California (USC) as our professor was a former professor there. Hence, many of (actually all of, so far) alumni received or started their degrees at USC. Now I am hoping to be one of the first to graduate with Ph.D. as a member to start at UF in this group! I had a great luck to work with three of alumni (Wei-jen Hsu, Shao-Cheng Wang and Sapon Tenachaiwiwat) while they were here at UF. I learned so much from them and they had been my examples to follow. I am proud that I had a chance to sit with such smart, intelligent and nice colleagues and appreciate them for their help in my research. Now as for our current members, I joined in this group with Udayan and Jeeyoung as the first of Prof. Helmy’s Ph.D. students at UF. Yibin, Gautam and Saeed had joined later (Guliz recently) and I have been having fun with all of them. They are not only smart but also very good friends as well. I am thankful that I can study with these brilliant members. We chat a lot about each other’s culture and learn so much. We also talk about comical things or hobbies many times. Research discussion goes on every time but it is very fun to talk about our research each other. We help each other by reviewing and giving feedback about works and papers. We have research meetings and workshops but we have informal types of workshops and meetings more frequently. Overall, this is the dream research group one can have and I am not exaggerating. My advisor, Dr. Ahmed Helmy, is one of the nicest people I have ever met. He is of course extremely smart but beyond that, I cannot thank enough for his patience and help with me. I think it is very rare to have someone so nice, productive and a great teachher at the same time and work with rigorous honesty. He points out the importance of quality in research. It was at first hard to catch the high standard but he helps so incredibly to eventually achieve a quality work. I had admired the quality of research that our former member had done and now that starts to occur to me as well. I was praised for my research presentation in my proposal with an external member stating as the best proposal he had been to. Further, I have so much to talk about with strong confidence about my research in my job interviews, where the feedback was equally impressive. I should delay writing something about my advisor till my graduation…… hahah… but so far I cannot even imagine better advisor and this is what our lab members talk all the time!
Personal Note
I started programming with basic language when my father bought me an APPLE II+ computer when I was 9 years old. Two years later, when the transition to 16-bit computer was about to happening, I was lucky to win a lottery to receive a brand new IBM 16-bit XT computer. Although limited in knowledge, I was able to create a shooting game (my friend helped with designing characters) with this powerful computer for fun.       That is where I began my fun life with programming although I had to stop it to prepare for a prestigious college, which I did. I know that computer science is much more than having fun with programming while creating some gadget programs. However, this is still a valuable experience for me and I appreciate for the opportunity whenever I have to think of a creative algorithm without knowledge on the domain. Showing a program to my friends and receiving a feedback, then improving it for better was not only a great excitement but also was a small-scale experience for interacting with users/customers.       I had to grow over though as I realized that contributions in a large-scale project involves a great deal of non-programming skills such as efficient communication, leadership, activeness and continuous motivation. I explored as much such option as possible during my college year. They are now the basis of my team work ethics that lead to success of many projects.       Nowadays, I am adding one more dimension to my exploration space – Ph.D. study. Learning research skills is a life-worth opportunity for various things. It is changing my attitude towards the objects and people around me, particularly with my research on human behavior. Research to me is about finding and understanding the trade-offs of events/objects/interaction systematically. It does not teach much about truth of computers. Rather, it leads to the belief that everything has multi-aspects. Thus, there is always a domain to explore and this fact provides us with the hope that we can always find a solution for the particular scenarios. I feel confident that having this driving-force is a great asset to approach to many difficult problems to find appropriate solutions eventually.       I would like to continue this journey with my long time friends - computers.
Last update: Jun 6, 2011