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The Present
I am currently an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, which is part of the School for Computer Science.

The Past
[Governor's School for Science and Math] My family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when I was two, and that's where I stayed for the next fifteen years. No, I don't have a Southern accent, but I do appreciate fried okra, fried chicken, fried onion rings (hmm, there seems to be a coronary-threatening theme here), grits, and sweet ice tea.

I spent two rewarding years of high school at South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Math (no, that name never did fit in any of those forms).

[Georgia Tech Logo] I did my undergraduate work Georgia Tech in Computer Science and in Discrete Mathematics. There, I learned to appreciate America's #1 toroidal breakfast food, also known as Krispy Kreme donuts.

[Cyberguide] I also worked on the Cyberguide research project with Gregory Abowd, a context-aware mobile tourguide, which was also an early example of ubiquitous computing.

After far too many years, I finished by PhD at University of California at Berkeley in the EECS department. While there, I worked on the SATIN sketching interface toolkit, the DENIM rapid prototyping tool for web sites, the WebQuilt remote web logging and visualization tool, and context-aware computing for firefighting.

I did my dissertation work on system architectures and user interfaces for privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing.

The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience I have also co-authored a book on web design patterns, entitled The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-centered Web Experience.

"Hong" in Other Languages
  • My Chinese name:
    hong - vast, immense; flood, deluge
    yi - suitable, right, fitting, proper
    an - peaceful, tranquil, quiet

  • In Klingon (Do a text search on "hong". Yes, I wish I were making this up...)
Quiz Bowl and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Quiz Bowl is a team game much like Jeopardy!, but is much more in-depth and covers a wider range of disciplines. I used to play at Georgia Tech, where I was part of the team that won a National Tournament in 1996. My old teammates are still keeping me in trouble, however. I also used to play Quiz Bowl at Berkeley. Too many of my neurons are devoted to bizarre facts about outdated scientific concepts (like phlogistons and phrenology), strange plants and animals (like rafflesia and three-toed sloths), and things that are just plain weird (like how capybaras, the world's largest rodents, are considered fish by the Roman Catholic church).

One of my friends on the quiz-bowl team was on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? I was one of his lifelines, and here's a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire video clip (680k windows media wmv) of when he called me. Regis Philbin is now my official arch-nemesis.

A prize we handed out at one tournament was a doll of David Levinson, Jeff Goldblum's character in the movie Independence Day, because one of our former teammates and now a professor of civil engineering at University of Minnesota is also named David Levinson. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have a picture of himself on his web page, so you can't see the striking "separated at birth" resemblance.

Humor