Bojie Li

This article summarizes the technical architecture of USTC iCourse.club. Founded in 2015, iCourse is a Flask-based website aiming at rating courses in USTC (University of Science and Technology of China). Although it is only a small website from a technical point of view, it offers a glimpse of the architecture of a typical web service.

USTC LUG GitLab will soon stop serving non-campus users. Although I have a campus email, to prevent sudden disconnection one day, I have backed up all my repositories locally and hung the public repositories on GitHub. As the first user of LUG GitLab, I have a total of 209 repositories, 123 of which are personal repositories. LUG GitLab was established on March 14, 2013 (Pi Day) and has been running for 9 years, even slightly earlier than Telegram. GitLab and VPN are the longest-running (9 years) network services I have established, serving thousands of users. I have long left the management and operation team, but I still have a lot of feelings for these services.

My GitHub homepage: https://github.com/bojieli

My USTC LUG GitLab homepage: https://git.lug.ustc.edu.cn/boj

These public repositories are mainly the course assignments I did at USTC, various undergraduate projects, and network services I did at LUG. Most of the projects I did during my PhD at MSRA have not been open-sourced. I only released the source code of SocksDirect and the LaTeX source code of several papers, some of which have been anonymized and do not retain internal commit information. The source code after work is even less likely to be made public at will. The already open-sourced MindSpore AKG project also anonymized the internal commit information when it was open-sourced (internal contributors after open-sourcing are directly developing on the public repo, but I have left the AKG project after open-sourcing).

Therefore, from the contributions on GitHub, you can see that the most contributions were in 2016, with 2000+ contributions; last year and the year before, there were only a pitiful number of contributions; there were 1000+ contributions from 2013-2015; only a few hundred from 2017-2019, one reason is that the project was not open-sourced, and the other is that I personally was somewhat detached from the front line of coding, pondering new research ideas all day, becoming a PPT engineer, and not spending much time on actually coding to implement ideas, which is also why I published fewer papers in the later stages of my PhD.

“Where did that gazelle go?” Mom suddenly asked me.

The gazelle Mom was talking about was a craft made of black hardwood. It was a gift from my dad when he returned from Africa. It had always been on the corner of my desk. At this moment, my heart started to pound, because I had given it to my good friend Wanfang yesterday.

As one of the founders of the USTC Course Evaluation Community, I am willing to promote the 2021 effort of several collaborators on my personal homepage: PI Review (https://pi-review.com/).

It has been 7 years since the establishment of the Course Evaluation Community in 2015. The community now has over 16,000 reviews and has a significant influence among USTC students. Many students refer to the reviews on the community when selecting courses. Anyone who has pursued a PhD or Master’s degree would likely agree that a mentor is crucial to a student’s life and future during these years. Although there are already many websites for evaluating mentors, such as Mentor Recommendation, Rate My Supervisor, and Research Control, they all have many issues. Here is a more detailed evaluation. The founders of PI Review discovered that there was no satisfactory website, so they established PI Review in 2021 and have added many new features this year.

PI Review operates on an anonymous basis. You only need to verify with your school email to post reviews, but the email verification is solely to prevent spam. Email addresses will never be made public, and we will not send spam emails. All posted reviews are anonymous. We welcome everyone to share their own or their friends’ mentors. If you think a mentor is good, you can help yourself by bringing collaborators on board. If you think a mentor is not good, you can help junior students avoid pitfalls.

PI Review currently suggests evaluating mentors across 5 dimensions, including Advisor Style & Mentorship (hands-on or hands-off, etc.), Expectations (publishing papers, work hours, etc.), Funding & Support (salary, internships, etc.), Research, and Lab Culture. Of course, this is just a reference, and you can evaluate mentors according to your own dimensions.

During my own PhD period, both of my Microsoft co-supervised mentors were very good to me, providing a lot of guidance and help. I have also written reviews on PI Review. If you are interested, you can look them up. The search function for mentors should be quite useful.

During the dance performance, the first half of “Flowers and Moon in Pairs” got stuck for the first time, restarted, and then got stuck twice again… becoming the program that brought the most joy to the audience :)

Short video (223 MB, 2:23)

If the playback is stuttering, you can move to Bilibili link

(This article is reprinted from CNSys Official Account, welcome to follow the official public account CNSys of ACM ChinaSys)

The ACM ChinaSys Colloquium held its first online academic lecture on April 29, 2022, with the theme of “System Research in the Industry” for academic discussion and exchange. Dr. Li Feifei, Vice President of Alibaba and Head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Database Product Division, and Dr. Tan Kun, Director of the Distributed and Parallel Software Laboratory of Huawei Central Software Institute, were invited as special guests to give academic reports and participate in online interviews. The academic lecture was hosted by Dr. Li Cheng, a special researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China, Dr. Li Bojie and Dr. Yao Ting from Huawei. The conference was conducted through Tencent online meeting room and Bilibili live broadcast, attracting more than 600 viewers.

(Long text warning: this article is about 17000 words long)

Recently, several friends came to me to talk about their choices. “A person’s destiny, of course, depends on self-struggle, but also needs to consider the course of history.” My father has always told me that choice is greater than effort. I have lived a third of my life and have made many choices: choosing computer competitions in junior high school, choosing both math and computer competitions in high school, choosing USTC for college entrance examination, regretting not getting into Tsinghua, switching from a math major to computer science in my sophomore year, giving up entrepreneurship, work and going abroad to choose MSRA in my senior year, choosing to go to a big company after getting my PhD, interviewing 12 companies and finally choosing to work at Huawei…

I have always had difficulty making choices, especially being easily entangled by sunk costs, and often struggling for a long time for things I can’t get. This leads me to prefer stability over risk when making choices. At the same time, I am quite idealistic, hoping to use my technology to change our lives. Looking back at these choices, I feel like Truman in “The Truman Show”, living in a huge studio, although these choices seem to be made by my own free will, they are the natural conclusions of the environment and personality preferences at the time; many times I have done some unconventional things, but I have been pulled back to the established track by an invisible big hand. This is probably the course of history.

The ACM ChinaSys Colloquium is an innovative program meticulously organized by the ACM ChinaSys Youth Committee. It aims to regularly organize high-level academic forums, invite top scholars in the field of computer system research at home and abroad to give speeches, create an active and lively academic atmosphere, thereby achieving the goal of providing an immediate stage for new technologies, new products, and new ideas; providing career planning guidance opportunities for young teachers and students; and building a bridge for academic and industrial exchanges.

The ACM ChinaSys Colloquium holds an online event every two months. The first event will be held from 10:00-11:30 on the morning of April 29, 2022 (Friday). This event specially invites Dr. Tan Kun from Huawei and Dr. Li Feifei from Alibaba to jointly explore “System Research in the Industrial Field”. After the academic report, there will be more exciting panel discussions and guest interview sessions. For specific content, please see the poster, and you are cordially invited to listen!

Live link: https://live.bilibili.com/24862620

The first event has ended successfully, click here for the press release

Update: Due to the pandemic, the wedding originally scheduled for May 1, 2022, and postponed to July 17, 2022, is postponed again to May 1, 2023. Please move to the latest version of the wedding invitation, thank you!