Personal Statement

Applicant: Mingming Chen Application ID Number:

Over the course of my undergraduate studies at Central South University, I gained a solid grasp of a
general cluster of knowledge in Computer Science and Networking (ranked 10 th /337, top 3%
among peers), which I enriched with experiences proposing and implementing tier 1 national
funded innovation projects. With the growing appetite for more in-depth exploration in computer
networking, I then completed my Master's degree work in Computer Science at Beihang University,
where I made concentrated endeavor at Networking and Distributed System Lab to further enhance
my expertise and research skills. With both breadth and depth of my academic and research
background, with my passion for more profound insights into Networking and XXX, I am well
prepared for doctoral studies in the Department of Computer Science at XXXX….

I had set my heart on joining graduate programs, and, rather ambitious, later becoming an
outstanding scholar upon my entry into the university. Therefore, alongside keeping a consistently
exceptional academic record, I availed myself of every opportunity in undergraduate years to
expand my research experience, gearing up for future graduate work. In 2007 and 2008, my
proposal for College Career Development Alliance (CCDA) Project and A Computer Network
Simulation Platform(CNSP) were short-listed as tier 1 National College Student Innovative Project,
a highly competitive award to encourage student nationwide to conduct independent research.
While being engaged in such a national funding support project would be at a premium, I became
one and only recipient of this grant in two consecutive years across my university. The project of
developing a network simulation platform, for example, was to address the demand of teachers and
students for a graphical user interface of Network Simulator 2 (NS2), sparing them from spending a
chunk of time learning to use this command-based software, thereby making them more focused on
the experiment contents. To this end, I referred to a large amount of research papers and completed
the platform design and visualization based on a full-scale scrutiny of the NS2 manual and source
code. Throughout this project, I developed a good command of Flex, Java Web, C++ and other
languages, while also reaching a fundamental understanding of network architecture and routing
protocols.

In addition to advances in technical aspects, this research experience enabled me to build a healthy,
positive outlook in facing hindrances and setbacks. In fact, the CNSP project went much less
smoothly than I had expected. When our team kicked off the CNSP project, we had 5 enthusiastic
members aboard, putting their shoulder to the wheel. As the project proceeded, however, three of
them successively quitted for various reasons, leaving behind reams of unfinished work. Therefore,
it would require me to take on significantly more responsibilities to keep the ball rolling. Moreover,
I had to juggle this work with other demanding tasks during the period of time (acceptance report of
the CCDA project, and my senior design as well), which made things even more challenging.
Whereas my friends and even my advisor suggested me to make compromised plans, I decided to
push my limit and meet this challenge, seeing it as a chance to get firsthand experience surviving
such a tough situation, which was most likely to recur over the academic journey ahead of me. To
beat the approaching deadlines, I worked out a tight schedule which I strictly adhered to, and
rounded off all the required tasks in a timely and effective manner.

While my academic performance earned me the admission of the graduate school at Beihang
University (eligible for a national entrance exam waiver), completion of CNSP project allowed me
to appreciate the impact of network topology on routing protocol simulation, network complexity,
efficiency and performance, hence setting a clear direction for my graduate study.

Now, as a Master student working at the State Key Laboratory of Beihang University, I have had
chances to conduct extensive research on computer networks through state funded projects. For
instance, I participated in the development of the topology discovery system for worldwide IPv6
backbone networks, where I achieved a detailed cognizance of underlying principles of the Internet
and LANs. Currently I am studying the statistical regularity of the Internet and social networks
from the perspective of complex networks, an intriguing multidisciplinary field that explores a
wide range of subjects including computer science, statistic physics, biology, sociology, economics,
and etc. This has supplemented my domain expertise with broad interdisciplinary knowledge and
provided insights about the interaction between disciplines. Here, I summarize my research work as
follows:

(1) Source Selection Methods. I proposed two source selection methods, one of which was the
delay-guiding method using the physical link delay between nodes as the metric to make source
selection decisions. This new approach turned out to be considerably more effective than the
existing methods in detecting the network topology. Based on this work, I contributed to a series of
papers, as shown in my CV, which were accepted by or under review of major international
conferences.

(2) Internet Routing Models. Two new models for real internet routing were put forward to replace
the questionable unweighted shortest path model. With a lot of efforts made and the pure Computer
Science-based approach coming to a dead end, I had to think outside the box, bringing into play my
knowledge in Statistic Physics and Traffic Communication Networks. This integration of
interdisciplinary expertise eventually turned the tide, producing gratifying outcomes. This pursuit
has been included in a working paper to be submitted to SIGCOMM 2012. As follow-up, I am
developing a Random Walk variation simulation model which may show a significant improvement
in both accuracy and efficiency over the previous model.

(3) Network Robustness. An interesting phenomenon, as we have observed, is that while high k-
core nodes play a more important role than high degree nodes in the Internet, a k-core-preferred
attack is notably less effective than a classic degree-preferred one. Therefore, extensive experiments
were performed on real Internet datasets to identify this underlying mechanism. This work was
included in a paper submitted to New Journal of Physics. Currently, I am exploring the evolution of
AS level Internet topology robustness, in efforts to reveal the evolution patterns, interestingly
enough, from the perspective of Economics.

(4) New Power Law. We observed through studying the traceroute probe from the real Internet
datasets that between each pair of the three parameters (i.e. the number of discovered nodes, the
number of discovered links, and the number of sources), there exhibits an explicit power-law
relationship, which could be used to predict the numbers of nodes and links to be detected and to
quantitatively characterize the marginal utility of additional sources and destinations in topology
discovery. The paper based on this work was accepted by GLOBECOM 2010 and its extended
version was submitted to Computer Networks.

结尾部分(模板)：
While I do have this deep adoration for my current research and would be pleased to continue this
exploration, I am open to step into other Networking related fields, such as Mobile Networks and
Cloud Computing. Also, my previous research experiences are good matches with that of Prof.
Mario Gerla, Prof. Lixia Zhang, and Prof. Deborah Estrin. It is my belief that I will be contributing
a great deal to the department program if I am fortunate enough to be offered the admission.