Hee Jung (Sion) Yoon, Ph.D. is an Associate Faculty at the City University of Seattle. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Health Informatics and Health Information Management at the University of Washington with minors in Geography, Environmental Studies, and Diversity, and a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. degree in Information & Communication Engineering at DGIST. Before joining the City University of Seattle, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Cyber-Physical Systems Global Center at DGIST. She has published a couple of patents and over 30+ full and short papers. With Sion and one of her research projects was featured on the Canada Discovery Channel. Her research interest focused on designing and developing surveillance applications for vulnerable people such as the elderly, patients, and children using the 3D depth camera. Examples of the projects that she worked on include fall detection and prevention for elderly individuals, aggressive behavior recognition for dementia patients, and child vs. adult classification for children’s safety. She has also collaborated on various healthcare projects such as automatic cell-counting, asthma ecosystem, heart rate detection, stress detection, biometric gait identification, as well as other topics such as zone-based temperature control and metro scheduling. 

At CityU, Sion teaches the following courses: Data Structures (CS 469), Technology Capstone (CS 497), Introduction to Cloud Computing (CS 519), C++ for Programmers (CS 555), Computer Science Capstone (CS 687), IT Compliance (IS 472), System Administration for Information Security (ISEC 505), Ethical Obligations in Information Security (ISEC 520), and DS 510: Artificial Intelligence for Data Science (DS 510). 

Radana:  Sion, congratulation on your research & publications! I am impressed that you were featured on the Discovery Channel! And thank you for agreeing to be interviewed for the STC Thursday Byte. Let‘s start off by telling us about your career path that brought you to where you are today. 

Sion:  Thank you, Dr. Dvorak. I first started by volunteering in the Health Information Management department of a Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup, WA, where I decided to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Health Informatics and Health Information Management. After graduating, I got an opportunity to continue further education in Information & Communication Engineering graduate program in South Korea. Through the master’s program, I found that I was very interested in Cyber-Physical Systems research, focusing on machine learning techniques for smart home and healthcare applications. After pursuing a master’s degree, I continued my education through the doctoral program in which, during the process, I got the privilege to collaborate with various researchers on fascinating projects. Thereafter, I spent about a year as a postdoctoral researcher and joined CityU almost two years ago. 

Radana: What‘s one thing you wish you had known when you began your career? 

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