Informational Interview with Telecommunication Industry

Informational Interview with Telecommunication Industry

- Interviewer: Youngsoo Park

- Interviewee: Name: Kim, Hee Young, E-mail: candys7@gmail.com / hykim@gatech.edu, Cell Phone: 404-663-   477, Class: PHD, Research Area: Statistics, Address: 2916 Clairmont Rd #2208, Atlanta GA 30329       

1.      What is your job at company?  What are your responsibilities?

   Research scientist & Statistical research in AT&T Labs. I usually research datas for developing Speech   mashup (Web app + speech) project. To be specific, Speech mashups provide an easy way for web developers to incorporate a speech interface into their web apps so their users can use voice commands and receive back spoken responses. All speech and language processing, from automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion, and natural language processing, is performed on AT&T servers so web apps get the advantage of AT&T's expertise in speech and language processing.

2.      Could you explain why you are attracted by your job, what did you decide to study this territory?

   I was excited about applying expertize (applied statistics) to solve business problems. Since my university, I was attracted by statistics in terms of functional organization.

3.      What skills sets do you look for in potential candidates?

   Proven technical skills in statistics, data mining, predictive modeling techniques, and analytical tools such as  S+, R and SAS in analyzing large data sets.

4.      To get your position, what was your educational background, and which level is required?

   I majored in Industrial engineering - specialization in statistics, PhD. Also, it is deeply related to the SCM, which try to find to optimal process for managing industrial lines.

5.        Are there particular jobs in your company where you have seen an increase and/or decline in recent years? What was the cause?

   Managing data is one of the hot issues in industry. For example, Vcodex is a platform of data transforms. A transform may encompass: different ways to compress data, different ways to encrypt data, translating data from ASCII to EBCDIC, etc. The uniqueness of Vcodex is that it provides an architecture that allows all of these different transforms to be programmable in a uniform manner and to be composed with one another to make up new transforms. It will bring about new phase in the sectors.

6.      What employment trends to you see in your industry over the next five years?

   AT&T Labs Research is a premier industrial research facility. We are dedicated to solving real problems in networking, data mining, large-scale systems, and in speech, language, and video processing and to designing and deploying innovative services. We explore fundamental research topics related to these goals. In upcoming few years, it is creating qualified jobs for high-educated candidates.

7.      How do companies in your industry differentiate themselves?

   No one can deny that invention and innovation are core objectives in Research, and our researchers and developers are continually strengthening AT&T's patent portfolio with patented technological advances.  AT&T receives approximately three issued patents per business day, and Research has contributed key patents in areas from network infrastructure to advanced IP communications services. It makes differences among other companies, standing out AT&T as the leader of industry.

8.      How do you think future expectation of your industry?

   The pipeline for new technology starts with fundamental research into areas on which AT&T's business is built, from the physics of optical transmission to foundational topics in computing and communications. Research on machine learning has improved algorithms for speech recognition, leading to better automated voice services. Research on "Steiner Trees" led to improved network design algorithms, helping make our access network more cost effective, and advances in fundamental data structures made it possible to handle massive data sets in speech processing and Internet traffic analysis.

9.       Could you give some advices future workers who want to get a job in your area?

   Above all, I want to recommend you to join the internship program of AT&T. Each summer, research interns from universities all over the U.S. come to AT&T Labs Research to work with individual technical staff members on research projects for 10 weeks. It will give you practical experiences of real workplace, and chance to make a career path for the future.