HU Yuxin Interviews with students in the international program in the School of Advanced Science and Engineering

Basically, one day I was walking with my friends at my high school (in Shenzhen, south China, near Hong Kong) and I saw a notice about this famous Japanese university, and I applied and got accepted. You may know that in China, Waseda is very famous, because some prominent political leaders studied here. The most famous is Li Dazhao, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party.

My major is electrical engineering and bio-science. I chose it because it includes a wide range of disciplines, and I’m not the kind of person who can stick with one subject. I really enjoy making connections, for example from electrical to bio-science to information science. In the lab, I’m doing the special information learning system, and each student can choose our own topic.

I’m doing a project where I’m applying information science techniques to try to predict stock prices. Recently I changed my strategy, experimenting with using the past 15 years’ data to do some prediction. I’ve also been trying to use natural language processing to analyze the news and see how today’s news affects tomorrow’s stock prices.

I’m still in the planning stages, but basically I’ll measure positive or negative emotions in news headlines, and then do classifications. For example, let’s say Apple has a positive comment in the news and then tomorrow, its stock price goes up or down — I’m trying to do this classification. That’s my recent direction.

Haha, everybody asks that! But no, the prediction performance is not ready. Last year I thought I’d predicted the stock price of Apple and I told everybody in the lab, “Apple is going to be great! Right now, invest in Apple.” And in two weeks, the stock price hit its lowest point in 10 years, and I was like, “Oh my God.” So I guess my model needs refining.

I’m in Murata lab, advised by Professor Noboru Murata, and it’s really good, because we can choose any topic we want. Electrical engineering and other disciplines are interesting, but they always need to collaborate together on big projects. What I like about information science is that I can either build something myself as an individual or make contribution to a bigger project.

For example, after interning at a big consulting company, I decided to build a small web computing application where you input a company name and it returns data in plain language that anybody can understand, whereas most of the work I did during the internship was performed on excel spreadsheets. I enjoy making a change or provide a new solution to current inconvenience. A lot of people might want to invest but they don’t have the knowledge, and this might help.

Everybody in the lab is very serious, but also helpful and friendly. It’s my first time to do programming and people patiently help me. My Japanese is not that good, so they slow down their speaking and repeat and listen to what I’m trying to express. Sometimes we have language exchanges in the lab as well.

Waseda has very good facilities, and lots of common areas and lounges with tables and whiteboards. It’s convenient for if we have something to discuss and demonstrate our ideas.

The faculty are helpful, and for international students they send a lot of reminders and tips for how to live in Japan. Because the classes are quite small, I get to communicate with professors a lot, and whenever I send a question by email they always reply very quickly.

Right now I’m a bit uncertain. In freshman year I thought I would be in electrical engineering, but now, in third year, I’m thinking of theoretical statistics. But recently that is changing as well, because I’ve learned a lot about software engineering.

I have this engineering background, but I’m also interested in sociology. I think I’d like to combine engineering and liberal arts. I don’t know what to call that, those two worlds together. So I think I’ll keep exploring.