Member in the Spotlight: Xing Fang

In this series, we introduce a member of our Society by means of an interview. This month, we are happy to introduce Xing Fang, a Ph.D student from North Carolina A&T State University, whose research interests mainly focus on natural language processing (NLP) and social computing.

What are your research interests in the signal processing field?

My research interest falls into the joint category of natural language processing (NLP) and social computing. Before I started my research on NLP, I have had several years of research experience on social computing. The existence of abundant social text data really motivated me to conduct research on topics belonging to NLP, such as semantic similarities and sentiment analysis.

Could you briefly introduce your research?

In terms of my research, I have proposed network reduction algorithms for social networks, based on categorical data. I am currently involved in a Big Data research project, where I have applied NLP algorithms for identifying potential connections among social datasets. Additionally, I am doing research on language models as well as sentiment analysis.

In your opinion, what was the most impressive result published in IEEE SPS journals and conferences within the last 12 months?

As a PhD student, it is crucial to constantly review most recent publications that are under my research area. The paper, entitled “A Decision Support Approach for Online Stock Forum Sentiment Analysis”, published on IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems by Wu et al. provides a detailed comparison between a statistical machine learning approach and a semantic approach for sentiment analysis. This work offers a very useful insight to me that the former approach generally performs better than the latter one, according to the paper.

Could you introduce an important state-of-the-art research issue (or technology) in this field (Other than your research)?

The increasing amount of social data also includes images and videos. In addition to natural language processing, I think that image and video data processing are other two important research issues in the field of signal processing.

In which way have you been connected first with IEEE?

My first connection with IEEE is one of my research papers submitted to the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. I definitely plan to submit my future PhD research work onto related IEEE conferences/journals as well.

In which way did you know the IEEE SPS e-NewsLetter?

I have been told by professors who have been actively working on their research fields that the IEEE SPS e-NewsLetter is a great way for finding high-quality publication venues in order to convey my research to the right audiences.