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Student Spotlight: Chao (Leon) Liu
“I selected computer science as my undergraduate major because I was a crazy science fiction fan in middle school and Asimov’s works about artificial intelligence were my favorite,” said Liu, originally from Hunan province. He read a lot about artificial intelligence during his freshman year at Wuhan Polytechnic University and wrote a brief review about it as his bachelor’s thesis. “However, the more I learned about artificial intelligence, the more I felt that it has many bottlenecks that cannot be figured out by the traditional method of programming. I believe we need to find answers from many other fields, and the most important one among them is cognitive and brain science.” He also believes that we must understand human intelligence before we can create real artificial intelligence. “This belief changed my life,” said Liu. While at Wuhan, he studied psychology on his own during his sophomore and junior years and took the entrance examination for the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in his senior year. “My life as a psychologist starts there,” he said. After earning his master’s degree, he came to Michigan in 2005 to study developmental cognitive neuroscience. “Michigan has one of the best psychology programs in the US and I had pleasant experiences working with my advisor, Twila Tardif, before I came here,” he said. His research focuses on how language influences something called “categorization processing.” In particular, he studies how the difference between English and Mandarin affects the category structure of English and Mandarin speakers. “Unlike English, most Mandarin nouns contain explicit linguistic cues to category membership.” For example, most Mandarin nouns embed information about the category (such as “che1,” which means “vehicle”) in the name of the members of that category (such as “huo3che1火车,” which means “train”), whereas English does not. Liu said this work brings him the greatest satisfaction when he studies his data for hours and finally sees a pattern that he can interpret or, as he puts it, “the moment when you get an ‘aha!’” His research has resulted in the publication of his first paper, which will appear in the journal Neuroimage. His work takes him back to China every other year, when he works with colleagues at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University. While in the United States, he has been able to travel a little. “I have been to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, but most of the visits are attending conferences so I didn't have enough time to spend there. My favorite places are the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are just fabulous!” He’s unsure what he will do after he completes his PhD. “I do not have a clear picture yet. My wife is also here so it is not just my own decision.” | |||||||||||||
What started as a fascination with science fiction—the works of Isaac Asimov in particular—led Chao (Leon) Liu on the road to his current doctoral research on cognitive and brain science.