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Francois Chin |
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Programme Manager, Towards Gigabit Personal Connectivity Programme
After 8 years of education in NUS as an undergraduate and postgraduate, I began my Research and Development career in 1995 as a research team leader for Smart Antenna Project at the Centre for Wireless Communications, before it became the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R) in November 2002. I was glad to be able to apply my expertise in signal processing in a job I liked. In this project, my focus was on blind signal equalization and array signal processing. I learnt a lot about wireless communication systems, starting with the cordless phone standard like DECT to 3G cellular mobile phones through this project. Having opportunities to deal with actual systems have broadened my interest to system design, wireless channel propagation and system performance analysis for general wireless communication systems. In my next project, which was smart antenna for 3G W-CDMA systems, my team has augmented our expertise into the next level of achievement; we filed a couple of patents and managed to receive a Vehicular Technology Conference best paper award in 1999.
Year 2000 was a year of research and career ‘disruption’ for me.  Research ‘disruption’ was when I took up a short-term project with General Electric on Ultra wideband synchronization analysis; a change in my research area that required different research skill set and knowledge. A career ‘disruption’ resulted when I was given the responsibilities of team management with the bigger challenge in interpersonal relationships. Though it was tough to catch up in the beginning, it did give me great sense of satisfaction and achievement. The precious experience attained in this short industry project had given me the confidence to “tackle” the great challenges ahead – pushing technologies into standards. Being engaged in the standardization game for the past 4 years had been both challenging and rewarding to me. Technical alliance, diplomatic negotiation, late-night teleconferencing and patent strategies – these are the ingredients of the game to ‘commercialize our research’, besides the usual internal discussion and intensive simulation. I could still vividly remember a moment when I had to burn the mid-night oil in the office just to meet the proposal submission deadline. I am grateful that our standards contribution eventually won us the IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award.
I²R is a place of fun and friendship as well. I enjoyed particularly the I²R Olympics Sports Day, organized by the Social Committee in I²R all these years, the casual table soccer matches and occasional racquet games with a couple of colleagues. It is also a place of scenery and solitude – a magnificent sea view out of my office window does hold back life’s hectic pace slightly and taking occasional breathers and prayers at the roof top ‘garden’ overseeing the horizon definitely help me to find inner peace.
What makes a good researcher? I would say three P’s: Passion for research and learning, Plan for your approach and success, and lastly Perseverance for achieving your goals. Over the last 10 years that I have been with I²R, I can testify that our organization has indeed the working atmosphere and ample opportunities for everyone to enthuse passion, execute plans and exhibit perseverance.
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