Whom
is Dr. Who (the same pronunciation as my last name - "Hu")?Hi, how are you? My name is Fei Hu. I am a guy who has passed probably (more than?) half of his life so far. I am currently a professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Alabama (UA). Here is my simple profession experience:
2015 - now , Professor, ECE, UA
2008-2015 , Associate Professor, ECE, UA
2002-2008 , Assistant Professor, CE, RIT (New York state)
In 2002, PhD from ECE, Clarkson University (New York state)
In 1999, PhD from Tongji University (China)
Produced
... 
During my faculty
career, I have also settled down 9NSF awards so far (by Year 2017) and other
grants. I got a total of ~$7M research grants as PI or co-PI. Well, I know
that $7M is a small number compared to some professors at MIT or other schools.
However, I wouldn't blame myself for this since funding depends on many
factors such as personal connections, research fields, proposal writing
skills, non-technical politics, reviewers, and many other factors. Moreover,
funding is not propotional to research capability. Einstein created Relativity
Theory without any funding support. I have also published
>200 papers so far (by Year 2017) (including books, book chapters, journal
papers (>20 IEEE Transactions papers), conference papers, thesis, and
dissertation). Again, This is a small number compared to some professors
(I know a professor published 1200 papers in 25 years, and another professor
published 500 papers in 10 years ...). Publications highly depend on graduate
students numbers and quality, research collaborators (so that you can co-author
papers with others insteading of writing everything by yourself), TAs available
in the department, and many other factors. I wouldn't use paper quantity
to measure career success. A professor may publish only one paper in his
entire life. As long as such a paper has huge impact in humans' lives (such
as the invention of Internet), it is better than 1000 little-or-no-impact
papers.What
research do I focus on? Wireless
Networks: I like sensors. They are like human's skin. Without
them we won't feel anything in this world. But how do we design low-power,
high-precision, low-cost micro-sensors for different sensing requirements
(such as medical signal collection, human intrusion detection, themal and
acoustic signals, gulf oil leaking, etc.)? Moreover, human's skin is an
integrated system, that is, all neuro-sensors are connected to a biological
network. Then for environment monitoring sensors, how do we perform in-network
distributed signal processing across a large-scale "sensor network"?
Artificial
Intelligence : I
like studying machine learning and artificial intelligence. In my recent
NSF and ARMY projects I have put significant research efforts in intelligent
sensor architecture and intelligent sensor signal processing. I especially
enjoy studing variational Bayesian, Manifold, Information Geometry, Semi-supervised
Learning, reinforced learning, non-parametric Bayesian inference, etc. Big
Data : I am interested
in big data analysis via scalable mahcine learning methods, big data transmission
in wireless networks, and big data security/privacy issues. Cyber
Security : I have
strong interest in network security, big data security, etc,