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In this episode of Buff Innovator Insights, meet Dr. Qin (Christine) Lv, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and CU Boulder Campus Director for “ASPIRE,” a new NSF center that is exploring transportation challenges facing our world today. Hear about Dr. Lv’s journey from China to Princeton and eventually to CU Boulder, where her interdisciplinary research intersects with domains such as Earth sciences, transportation electrification and sustainability.

Terri Fiez

Hello, and welcome to Buff Innovator Insights. I'm your host, Terri Fiez, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder. This podcast features some of the most innovative ideas in the world. It also introduces you to the people behind the innovations, from how they got started to how they are changing our world for the better.

Today, we'll meet Dr. Christine Lv, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the CU Boulder campus director of a new National Science Foundation center called Aspire. This new center is trying to solve some of the most pressing transportation challenges facing our world today. Dr. Lv's research integrates systems, algorithms, and applications for next level data analytics in scientific discovery and computing. Before joining CU Boulder, she received her master's degree and PhD from Princeton University.

During today's podcast, we'll learn about Dr. Lv's early interest in computer science and her successful progression through the educational system in China. We'll hear about her transition to living in the US to do her postgraduate work at Princeton and what brought her to Boulder. And she tells us how her research and teaching are fulfilling her passion for supporting sustainable and equitable transportation for the future. I can't wait for you to meet Dr. Christine Lv.

Well, thank you for joining me today, Christine.

Dr. Christine Lv

Hi, Terri. It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Terri Fiez

So let's just get started. You grew up in China in what would be considered a relatively small town in China, maybe not by US standards. What was that like?

Dr. Christine Lv

Right. So I grew up in Shaoyang, which is in Hunan province. So it's in southern China. So the city is small. By small, I mean we have probably 180,000 people, so it's not too small by the US standard, but it is still considered small city. So my father was a judge. My mother was a physics teacher. So growing up, I think I definitely get quite a bit of kind of logistic kind of reasoning kind of training from my parents. I also have two siblings. I have a older sister and a younger brother, so it's definitely fun to have siblings growing up.

Terri Fiez

So you were the middle child?

Dr. Christine Lv

Yes.

Terri Fiez

So the middle child is the one that helps everything come together and helps people work together generally. So what was the school like that you attended in elementary school?

Dr. Christine Lv

So the elementary school, well, I remember it's a reasonably large class. I think I was in a class of 40 or 50 students. So I enjoyed it. I think growing up, like I'm generally an outgoing person so I think I have a lot of good friends. So I just like enjoyed going to school with my friends and I did reasonably well at school, so yeah, I liked it.

Terri Fiez

So you had a unique opportunity when you were a teenager. Tell us about that.

Dr. Christine Lv

Yeah, that is actually very important point in my life. So as I was about to graduate from middle school, so back then, most of the top students would actually always just consider going to a trade school. Basically, like after that, you get like three years of training and you have a reliable job, right, then have income. So by the time I was about to graduate, there was a very unique opportunity. It's a special gifted class that was organized at the province level.

Terri Fiez

So when you say province, that would be equivalent to a state in the United States?

Dr. Christine Lv

Yes. The intention actually was to kind of like train students, right, to compete at the national level and the international level of this [inaudible]. So it is designed as the most prestigious like computer science competition for secondary school students, so basically just like middle school students. And then the focus is a lot is about kind of programming. So it's about like you need to learn how to design a program and you need to then, of course, write your program and then they were tested for correctness and efficiency. So that was really more like the foundational part of computer science and I got really interested 'cause I see like the great potential of like using computers to do a lot of things.

Terri Fiez

So prior to getting this unique opportunity, had you been exposed to computer science? Was it one of your favorite subjects?

Dr. Christine Lv

No, not at all. Like I had never seen a computer or a keyboard before I started, so that's how I say like without this opportunity, I probably wouldn't be in the computer science field.

Terri Fiez

So this school was also removed from ... you had to leave your parents home when you were relatively young and live there. How did that work and were you homesick?

Dr. Christine Lv

Right, that's a very good question. So yeah, I think I was 14, but the good thing was that because our class like had students from all over the province, so most of us are like remote, like we're remote, right? So we live away from our hometown. So we actually had our dedicated like dorms for us for the whole class, and then we had dedicated dining hall and actually, a special chef for the whole class. So it was actually nice in a way, even though I did miss my family a lot, but it is also nice just to be in this kind of small community where we're kind of together all the time.

Terri Fiez

Was this before cell phones?

Dr. Christine Lv

Yes. Yes.

Terri Fiez

So you weren't talking to your parents every day, I would guess.

Dr. Christine Lv

No. No. I think I remember like my father actually tried to visit me probably about once per month. That was about it.

Terri Fiez

So clearly, you did really well in this school. What happened next? How did you decide where to go to college?

Dr. Christine Lv

Right. So, yeah, while in middle school, so I competed at the province level in this Olympic contest, and then I did a very well. I got into the national level. Again, I did pretty well, not the top. I didn't get to go to the international level contest, but I was among the top 15 for the national level. And with that qualification, so I was actually automatically admitted by Tsinghua University whose computer science department obviously considered the best in the country. So I was one provided such opportunity to just enroll into computer science at Tsinghua University. And by then, I already decided computer science would be the major I want to enroll in.

Terri Fiez

Yeah. And I'm very familiar with Tsinghua University graduates, really, really top students because it's really like the top university in China. So I can appreciate that that had to be challenging for you to go there. So you went there to major in computer science. And when you graduated from there, then what?

Dr. Christine Lv

Right. So a lot of my classmates then were probably like thinking about like finding job when they graduate, but I already kind of decided I want to continue with the graduate study. Another thing that's also like actually was very nice environment was that like Tsinghua University had a lot of students like going abroad after their undergrad study. So I definitely like benefited a lot from that kind of environment. There was a lot of kind of support and resources for me to then figure out how to actually do it.

Terri Fiez

So tell us about where you went to do your PhD and what your PhD research was.

Dr. Christine Lv

Yeah. Right after I graduate from Tsinghua University, I went to Princeton University. So my PhD advisor, Professor Kai Li, so he was original also from China and he actually visited Tsinghua University, and we start just talking about his research work and well, I am interesting so I think that definitely helped a lot. So my initial focus was on distributed storage assistance. So the idea is that how you store a lot of data and across many, many machines, right. And then on top of that, if you are able to store lot of data, then of course, you want to be able to search for information, right. You don't just store data and then having trouble finding them.

But then like as I get to my kind of dissertation study, I was really thinking about well, we don't want to look at the data as black boxes, meaning that I don't care what they are, I just put those blocks of data here and then find them later. I really want to look into the data and see where they are. So that really kind of like pushed me more into this kind of data analytics angle. So the idea is that not only we know we're managing a lot of data, but also we will learn from the data. So we will kind of look into the data and trying to discover interesting patterns from the data, which we can then leverage in real world applications.

Terri Fiez

Yeah. And of course, data has become the word of the day with AI, machine learning and basically doing information extraction from that data. So you were really at the beginning of all of that, it sounds like.

Dr. Christine Lv

Right. Right.

Terri Fiez

So you also had a graduate advisor that helped you when you came to the United States and gave you some great advice. Talk about that.

Dr. Christine Lv

So yeah, Melissa Lawson, so she was the graduate program advisor when I started at Princeton. So I remember like when we started in the first year when we just arrived, there were actually a group of probably 10-ish Chinese students. So we came in the same year, so we were pretty close to each other, right. So we were always kind of together. We did a lot of things together and then, we were speaking Chinese together all the time.

So Melissa like came to us actually one day, really just kind of talking to us about the importance of kind of like one speaking English, because well, if we want to kind of like get better connected to the culture, to the language and really kind of become part of the community, right. We don't want to just be in our own kind of isolated group. So she really encouraged us to speak in English all the time. And also, she then also kind of spent a lot of time just working with each of us, like having us reading papers or like newspapers, or just kind of like talking to her and she would point out like accent issues or just errors, right, we were making. That helped me a lot.

Terri Fiez

Was it hard to be away from home and a continent away while you were here going to school?

Dr. Christine Lv

So Princeton was a small town. I like the small town like feelings. People there were really nice. So I really just, I feel they helped a lot just in terms of like me transitioning like from kind of brand new kind of international student, but become more connected to the community and the cultural aspect and really being able to kind of like feel I'm becoming part of the community. So that really helped.

Of course, like I miss my family a lot. I remember like back then, we had the visa restrictions like between US and China. I think I couldn't go home every year. It was probably every other year I would go back. So it was hard then. Also actually, one of the things like my father actually passed away before I finished my PhD study. So that was definitely also like one [inaudible] that like it was just too far away for me to be like back by his side.

Terri Fiez

That must've been very, very hard.

Dr. Christine Lv

Yeah.

Terri Fiez

So after you finished your PhD, you decided to stay in the United States and find a faculty position. So you started at Stony Brook University and then you came to CU Boulder. What drew you to Boulder?

Dr. Christine Lv

Right. So I mean the number one [inaudible] actually was more like the [inaudible] issue. So my husband then, like he was at CU Boulder, and I was at Stony Brook. So we knew we had to kind of, one of us had to move, right. But in terms of me moving to Boulder, I remember my first visit to Boulder, like just driving over the hill and then seeing the city at the valley of the foothills, it was so pretty. Like I was really like really impressed like for the first sight. But the second part is really people, right? So once I like arrived at Boulder, I start to interact with people like in my department in the university, but also my neighbors, just the general community. I feel this is just a very nice community because of the people we have here.

Another part, that's more about my research, right? So I started like talking to people about collaboration even before I arrived at Boulder. So I really feel that there were a lot of opportunities and the collaboration was like really encourage it, and kind of how do I say, facilitate in many ways, right. And that was very important, right, for my research work.

Terri Fiez

Well, and those research collaborations have paid off. You were recently one of the principal investigators of the new National Science Foundation engineering research center, which is called ASPIRE, Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification. What does the center aspire to achieve?

Dr. Christine Lv

Right. Yeah. That's a very good question. So ASPIRE focuses on electrified transportation, okay. So the vision of the center is that we want to support sustainable and equitable future for transportation because generally like by improving the transportation sector, we want to be able to improve the health, the prosperity, but also equity and access. 'Cause nowadays, if you look at like electrical vehicles, right, we talk about the technology side, about how you design the battery system, how you design the vehicles and the charging infrastructure, but all those need to come together so that we can support widespread electrification across different vehicle classes and also very importantly, across different adoption groups, right. We don't want like some groups to be left behind or be disadvantaged if we are not considering this as a whole.

Terri Fiez

Christine, so how are you using data to inform our ability to use the electrical infrastructure?

Dr. Christine Lv

So if you are a local community, if I say, okay, now don't you like have some kind of charging infrastructure nearby? What does it mean, right? What kind of like environmental impact it may have on my community, right? So we're looking at the data that will really quantify the environmental benefit, right, or potential health impact if certain percentage of the traffic or the vehicles are converted to electrical vehicles. So basically here, we're using data to really model the impact, right, when we go to other for different kind of community settings.

Terri Fiez

So what is your part in this research center?

Dr. Christine Lv

I serve as a campus director for University of Colorado Boulder. So Boulder is a core campus within ASPIRE. So we actually have quite a few faculty members, staff members, and students, right, participating in the center. So as a campus director, I really want to just be able to kind of oversee, right, our campus participation within ASPIRE. So that's one part of it. The other part is from the research angle is that I'm serving as the data research's thrust lead. So within ASPIRE, we have four research thrusts. So there's power, there's transportation, adoption and data. So I'm leading a team of data scientists.

Terri Fiez

Yeah, that sounds really exciting. As part of your role as a professor, you also teach classes. What classes do you teach and what's your favorite class to teach?

Dr. Christine Lv

I have taught ... Let me see. So since starting at CU Boulder, so I have created the data mining course. Another one is the big data analytics. This was a more kind of advanced topics course for graduate students. And also, I teach this more like a intro course, one is introduction to the CS PhD program, which is for first year PhD students. Another one is introduction to the CS research based master's program. So again, it's for incoming master's students who are in the research based the program.

So I think I like teaching of all, those are all very good courses. They have different purposes, but they all kind of cover different things and really help our students. But one course I particularly like is the data mining course. So this course is offered to both undergraduate students and graduate students, okay. This course particularly is interesting because one, of course, it's directly connect to my research. So I really like it, but also within this course, I have built a like not just the lectures, right, but also a core kind of course project component. And this project actually need to be designed by the students themselves. So basically, student can form their groups. They pick their own focus and their own datasets that they want to work with and then kind of work through the whole process of like mining from a lot of data.

So, every year, I'm really kind of interested to see just a lot of kind of very interesting ideas. And so that's one part I really like. I always like, like the feedback when students say that while it was hard, it wasn't an easy process, but that they really enjoyed the process of kind of working with real data and working on some projects that they are really interested in.

Terri Fiez

Sounds like a class I'd love to take. So what are you most proud of in your career and what do you hope your legacy will be?

Dr. Christine Lv

That's a very good question. So as a professor, right, I think that there are two important aspects of my work, right. So one is the research, right? So I really see the value of high impact research, meaning that I want my research work to be able to benefit the bigger society and really kind of see real world adoption. So I would be very proud if like my research work, like down the road, really have a huge impact in the society and through actually the ASPIRE center and some of my other research projects, I do feel we are pushing the boundaries and we are going to really make the world better with more advanced research work. That's one.

The other part, being a professor, right? So education is a core part. And I really feel that that's actually very important, right? It's not just about like the individual classes I go to or the particular materials I teach. What I really treasure is the growth, right? How our kind of young scholars, right, they learn the materials, but really they become like independent like experts, right, in their own field to become leaders, right, and also better thinkers, not just say the mechanics of the work, but really it's about visionary and leadership work when they go out and they grow and they become like really the experts in their own areas.

Terri Fiez

So Christine, as you look forward to the future, you can't help but think about your own triplets that you have. They're eight years old now. What is it that you're optimistic about your field and the future and the future it will create for them?

Dr. Christine Lv

Right. I think that's also one thing that when I talk about like ASPIRE being supporting sustainable and equitable transportation and more broadly, like the impact of my research, right. I do feel sustainability of equity are really important and that's something that I really strive to make it better.

So yeah, connect to my triplets, so I think they really amaze me 'cause, for example, like they know what I work on, right. They can already talk about what data mining is, they can talk about electrified transportation. So they kind of got the concepts, right? And through that process, I'm also kind of like showing them how important it is to provide like a sustainable future, right, for the environment we live in. So I really feel that it's important for us to really kind of say guide and lead the next generation. So we do our best to make it better for next generation, but this concept and this kind of continued effort, right, is important for us to carry on and for the next generation to carry on.

Terri Fiez

Well, thank you, Christine. This has been a great conversation. Thank you for joining me today.

Dr. Christine Lv

Thank you.

Terri Fiez

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Christine Lv, associate professor of computer science and the campus director for CU Boulder's new ASPIRE NSF Center. To learn more about Dr. Lv, you can visit . For this and other Buff Innovator Insights episodes, you can also visit colorado.edu/rio/podcast. I'm your host and vice chancellor for research and innovation at CU Boulder, Terri Fiez. Thanks for listening to Buff Innovator Insights.