Most of my experiences with Unix came from my education at Department of Computer Science, Zhejiang University. When I was a senior, I spent the whole year at Knowledge Engineering Laboratory, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, to do a NSFC project. My work was to implement the inference engine for a knowledge representation system (KRS) using C to enhance the efficiency and human-machine interaction of the LISP-based KRS. (Of course there undergo great progress within recent 10 years with LISP.) Therefore I took some graduate courses on AI for better understanding. I also gained experiences of using pointer and the application of recursions. Such an undergraduate project gained an A grade (10%). On that project, I also fulfilled the coordination work since I had to use knowledge base. My peer in KB also won an A. We really built a very excellent working group.
When I did computerized water resources decision support system two years later, my past experiences in UNIX benefits me greatly. I was also very happy to access Sunview (later OpenWin) and TCP/IP in 1991. In order to fulfill the integration work for whole DSS, I had to understand those knowledge for better communication with other peers. Since 1995, I served as the system and network manager for my affiliated department until I came to the States.
Last year, I was really fascinated with Microsoft visual programming languages, especially Visual Basic which saved me so much time when doing an evaluation project. Using ODBC mechanism for connecting a database based on Visual FoxPro also let me feel so excited when I knew it was unnecessary to build the database by Microsoft Access.
In modeling work, the key question is not only with computer implementation. If there are no errors of all programs, that does not mean a reasonable model is built, we have to make sure the model is validate. Do the thing right is not enough, we should do the right thing.
Last revised: October 12, 1998.