Thank you for visiting my website.

I am a PhD candidate in Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. I will defend my dissertation shortly, which is called The Social Meaning of Sharing and Geocoding: Features and Social Processes in Online Communities. It is about the use of geotagging technologies in social media. My initial results show that geo technologies make people rely more on effective reputation systems and recommendation systems. Geolocation alone is not a strong enough social glue.

My other research projects involved the groups in online games, information sharing online, and mobile social networks. My next project is about what precits success and popularity for open source software projects on GitHub. For my research projects, I taught myself Python, Django, HTML, jQuery, and machine learning modeling. GitHub and StackOverflow made the learning process so much easier and fun. So I really want to understand what makes them work so well, from a community and educational perspective.

I live in Chino Hills, California with my wife Yiye and my son Evan. You can reach me by email, facebook, LinkedIn or twitter.