‘Word Count: 1100 Tam applying to Harvard's doctoral program in economics in pursuit of a career iin academic research. I entered economics research because I enjoy modeling real- world situations with math, This interest was confirmed by my research work, which included projects on mortgages, optimal surveys, and consumer savings. These research experiences also led me to discover that I enjoy theory work, especially theory fields that see wide use in empirical research, fields like game theory and mechanism design, My interest in game theory and behavioral economics recently led me to ‘explore the subfield of learning in games, in which I have a few research ideas. T entered economics research because I enjoy the process of modeling social situations, the process of looking at an economic phenomenon, thinking about the key empirical factors, and making the correct variable and structural choices to generate a tractable model that explains the situation. For example, one project I worked on for Professor John Jonson involved finding a formula that gave the best time to refinance mortgages. In this project, I enjoyed contemplating the various tradeoffs between simplicity and richness that went into the model design. Should we model interest rates a5 mean reverting, or is a simple random walk sufficiently approximate? Should we be precise and model mortgage amortization time, or should we avoid an extra state variable and instead just use a time-stationary hazard rate? These tradeoffs were interesting to think about, and existed in all projects: for example, my work on optimal ‘surveys required careful consideration of response interaction complexity. Overall, my research work confirmed my interest in economic model building. In doing research work, I also began to discover a new interest in economic theory, especially in theory work that is heavily used by empirical economics. For the mortgage-refinancing project, my major personal contribution was finding a closed-form ‘solution for the refinancing formula. I discovered that I enjoy carefully thinking about the highly mathematical parts of the problem, like the existence conditions for the formula’s solutions or the analytic details of the bellman equations. Similarly, I enjoyed ‘the process of finding mathematical insights in my optimal survey project. One insight involved using a multidimensional envelope theorem; another insight involved pushing a standard delta-method technique in statistics to infinite cases. In both project, 1 was ‘especially satisfied to know that these theoretical results advanced practical goals in empirical research. For mortgage research, a closed-form solution significantly advances ‘the paper's goal of providing a simple formula homeowners can use. For optimal survey research, the math insights led to a method of construction of the best survey possible. The method was put to actual use for a separate journal article on empirical intertemporal discount rates. Through all these projects, I both enjoyedSTATEMENT OF PURPOSE A desire to extend my knowledge and an enthusiasm to solve the demanding problems faced by the industry today, motivated me to pursue Master's in Networking | believe that my educational background has instilled in me the qualities required to meet the rigor of this demanding course, and subsequently, the profession. | bring along with me a strong grasp ‘of fundamentals in Electronics, unique but relevant work experience, along with a desire to eam, a penchant for teamwork and leadership, and a zest for challenges. ly frst biggest decision which set the path for my career was choosing Electrical Engineering as my fect of study even though my parents were against it, Being the owner of a manufacturing company lin the FMCG industry; | remember the day | and my fether had an argument about what | should do ‘with my life, While he wanted me to pursue Business Management, | always had @ desire to know how things work, wanted to Fearn by experience & yeamed to solve challenging problems. Ever since the day my father brought our first television sot home, | have had @ peculiar interest in knowing how ‘one cauld fit an entire ward into such ¢ small box. A few other insanely inquisitive questions led me to choose 10 study Electrical Engineering, and | stil bolieve that itis the smartest thing | have ever stone. lam deeply inspired & motivated by my professor Dr. Rama Chandran, who is very well known in the ‘country for his contnbutions to the Department of Telecommunications, Goverment of india., Upon hhis advice, | decided to pursue, and thereby developed an interest in “Networking” during my third year, The courses “Computer Networks’ and “High Speed Networks’ coupled with my summer interishia at Vodafone, where | handled Routers and Servers, made me realize how muuch linterested | am in “Networking”. Consequently, | chose to specialize in Networking. My interest further aligned me to design a Bluetooth Personal Area Network for controling and monitoring the functioning of all the devices connected to the sarne network, Towards this, | chose to fake "TCPAP Networking" and "Network Security and Cryptography” as part of my coursework dunng my fourth year. My interest in these courses reflected in my GPA, standing at 9:6 on a scale of 10 in these subjects, | also began increasing my cognizance sbout Compuler Networks by collecting linfarmation from the internat and reading research papers which soon turned into passion for me. | also worked on two projects during my third year The first was “Bluetooth using ILABView’ where | led @ team of seven students. We used LABVIEW Bluetooth module to conirol and transfer data from one device to another by varying the quarter wave antenna Jlength thereby increasing the range of the Bluetooth device. Although the increase in the fange compared to the batlery consumption was not commercally viable, we were ‘successful in increasing the usage range of the Bluetooth device. Based on my interest towards networking. | was placed in one of the largest telecommunicstion ‘companies in my stata, “Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited’, to undergo a very prestigious iimemship program which allowed me to work in the company for the entire summer. A study on the ‘company and its products, introduced to me the importance of providing innovative solutionsStatement of Purpose ‘Computer scientists and artists are altke Just like artists express their unlimited imaginations -on their works, computer scientists create programs to express their own kind of imaginations, which is about a better world with advanced technology. They are painting and composing touching melodies to demonstrate their imaginary paradises by devising, new algorithms and writing lines of code. Being a well educated computer scientist as well as a music creator, began another round of soul searching, trying to figure cut my goal of life after graduating with excellent performance from the top university computer science program in Taiwan: the Computer Science and Information Engineering department in National Taiwan University (NTU CSIE) Finally, the answer emerged, in company with my great desire to benefit this world by applying what I had leamed to humans? daily lives. Long for catalyzing the world’s evolution to become s high-tech wonderland with my creativity and knowledge in Artificial Intelligence. Therefiwe, [ believe Stanfocd, the world’s leading academy and abundant in creative energy, will be my beset next step to pursze my ideal ‘My interest in Al was ignited by the university courses. In addition to famous Al products such: as Roomba the smart vacuum cleaner and Mars Raver, one application I saw in Al course deeply fascinated me. It was the project Inner House AI for Elders: smart equipntents were installed everywhere in the house to detect the health conditions of old people living in the house, and ensure their safeties. This idea was so attractive to me, as this kind of application leads to more convenient human lives, yet never forgets to take care of humanity issue. Elders might feel uneasy with a human house care, and thus using computers as alternatives seems a perfect solution to provide elders with safer living enviroment. With AL, computers are no longer cold machines; they become guardians, housekeepers, or even friends that keep good company instead. For me, AL will certainly be my greatest tool to benefit the whole world. The slogan proposed by Nokia goes great Technology always comes from humanity. Alis there to play the role of aiding humans through their lives, and appropriate usage of this technology will bring about a great deal of smiling. and happiness, elevating people's living standards, I, being a computer scientist, am absolutely responsible for letting more people enjoy the consequences of technology. My enthusiasm for AI supported me to conduct AI research. In my senior year, I entered the AL lab in our department and bewan researching under the supervision of Prof. Jane Yung-Jeng Hsu My partner Shoou-I Yu and I cooperated to research on "Tag Recommendation”. Tags were said to ‘be usefil for searching and document administration, but most documents on the lntemet lack tags, and what we wanted to do was automatically put tags into documents, We used a machine learning approach to guess the appropriate tags of a document sceording to the training data ia which documents were already aged by some users oa the Internet. Starting from investigating related papers about tag recommendation, we found defects in traditional recommendation methods, and thus proposed cur algorithm as a better solution to these defects, Being new to tag recommendation issues, | found it hard and sometimes frustrating when conducting the research project, However, all _our efforts paid off as we published the full technical paper “A Content Based Method to Enhance 1One of the first things | learned regarding the legal system was the concept that nothing in the world is completely black or white. It started with a game that my brother used to play called “what if”, and required us to keep proposing different scenarios to challenge a concept. Through this game, | learned that every action had to be evaluated in context to fully understand its reasoning and origins, and that the law existed to provide guidelines for how to handle each unique case. This inspired me to take on legal studies as a college student, and | hope to continue my journey in the field of law through the opportunity to attend law school For the past two years, | have been working as a legal assistant for a criminal justice lawyer to further my experience and knowledge in the field, Through preparing standard legal documents and taking care to retain records of each filing, | have learned that one small misstep can make all the difference in a case. Additionally, in working directly with clients, | have learned to put aside my personal judgments in pursuit of the truth. These experiences have heightened my appreciation for the work that lawyers do. and | hope to be able to join their ranks in the future My goal is to become a criminal justice lawyer as well, helping to provide evidence-based context in a legal setting for my future clients. In law school, | will be trained in the art of rhetoric as well as logic. and will be able to familiarize myself with landmark cases that have set historical precedents. My experience learning from professors and peers will encourage me to think out of the box, and | am confident that my experience in law school will sharpen my mental acuity and allow me to improve my understanding and ability to interpret the law.