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International PhD

During nearly three years of working at ABB, as one of the leading company in automation and power technologies, I’ve seen the great changes and benefits that information technology has brought to the traditional industry. My ABB life started with the internship as software developer for PGIM (Power Generation Information Manager), which can archive the process data for long term and conduct data evaluation and analysis. After that I got a job not for developing PGIM but as a service engineer to give customers basic trainings about the different products and systems of ABB and to install and commission PGIM on site. On one hand, doing this job makes the chance being an excellent developer smaller; on the other hand, I could go deep into the industrial process where the power is produced, get to know the whole Industrial IT solution supplied by ABB according to the need of high productivity and sustainability. Through working with experienced engineers I also got experience about how to plan and apply the Industrial IT solutions in active projects.

At the same time I found out further research and developments of systems e.g. for efficiency and optimization are strongly asked, particularly to solve the problems which are too expensive and dangerous by direct experimentation. This incited me to think about why we couldn’t model them in a scientific way, use numerical simulation to study the suggested solutions, analyze the risks and evaluate different solutions? Computational Engineering, which integrates knowledge and methodologies from computer science, mathematics and domain expertise of a certain engineering area, such as electrical, mechanical, along with advanced computer algorithms and architectures, has being shown its great potency in solving those large-scale and complex problems. My special interest in your program is a real scientific research experience directed to the effective solution of problems in the field of electrical engineering, and this is what I pursue for my professional life in the future.

This idea always brought me back to my university time in China, when I joined the China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CUMCM) in 2000 and won the second prize in our province. The task was to design a mathematical model to extract the characteristics from two kinds of known DNA sequences and according to those characteristics to construct a method to classify the unknown DNA sequences. I found it really amazing to represent the objects of the problem and apply a mathematic model to solve the problem. This was like a clue for me, when I started my study “Information Engineering” in Germany and had difficulty in understanding the underlying theoretical concepts and applications. Later I just have the feeling that I got the point of the study, not only because the course “category theory” shows me how it captures the common features of many different mathematical structures and relationships between them; not only because the course “Neural Networks” presents so various models and methods to classify, analysis and diagnose data; but the strategy, the methodology to deal with the practical problems in life. The followed internship and working at ABB, as a good complement for my study, brought me direct to a completely new application field --- power generation and opened a live engineering world for me. Despite the unfamiliarity to that field, I could get involved in work quickly, which encouraged me a lot to strive for my goal. I believe with my potentials and your fine structured program, I will have a successful research life in Computational Engineering in xxxxxxx.