Agenda in Review

Prof Tim Kwang Ting Cheng became the Dean of Engineering in May 2016 in concurrence with his appointment as Chair Professor jointly in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

He graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1988 with a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Before joining HKUST, he was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he served since 1993. Prior to teaching at UC Santa Barbara, he spent five years at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

At UC Santa Barbara, Prof Cheng had taken up various important academic leadership roles, such as Founding Director of the Computer Engineering Program from 1999 to 2002, Chair of Department of ECE from 2005 to 2008, Acting Associate Vice-Chancellor for Research in 2013 and Associate Vice-Chancellor for Research from 2014 to 2016 where he helped oversee the research development, infrastructure, and compliance of UCSB’s research enterprise with over US$200 million extramural research funding.

A highly respected teacher-scholar and internationally leading researcher with excellent experience in fostering cross-disciplinary research collaboration, Prof Cheng is a world authority in the field of VLSI testing and design verification, as well as an impactful contributor across a wide range of research areas including design automation of electronic and photonic systems, mobile computer vision, and learning-based multimedia computing. He had previously served as Director of the US Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Center for 3D Hybrid Circuits which integrated CMOS and nano-memristors for future computing systems. He has published more than 400 technical papers, co-authored five books, held 12 US patents, and transferred several of his inventions into successful commercial products. He is a Fellow of IEEE and his works are of high impact with due recognition from the field, including 11 best paper awards and one Distinguished Paper Citation in major conferences and journals. He was also recognized as the Top 10 Author in Fourth Decade Award and Design Automation Conference (DAC) Prolific Author Award at the 50th DAC 2013.

Prof Cheng has been very active in providing professional services to the IEEE and to the academic community at large. Having served as the editor-in-chief of IEEE Design & Test of Computers, on the boards of IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation’s Board of Governors and IEEE Computer Society’s Publications Board, and on various technology advisory or working groups including the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), Prof Cheng has been internationally known as an eminent member of the field.

Lei Chen received the BS degree in computer science and engineering from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 1994, the MA degree from Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand, in 1997, and the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2005. He is currently a full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include crowdsourcing over social media, social media analysis, probabilistic and uncertain databases, and privacy-preserved data publishing. The system developed by his team won the excellent demonstration award in VLDB 2014. He got the SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award in 2015. He is PC Track chairs for SIGMOD 2014, VLDB 2014, ICDE 2012, CIKM 2012, SIGMM 2011. He has served as PC members for SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, SIGMM, and WWW. Currently, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of VLDB Journal and an associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Transaction on Data and Knowledge Engineering. He is a member of the VLDB endowment.

Prof Sang Kyun Cha is a professor, an innovator, and an entrepreneur. He developed three generations of in-memory transactional and analytical data platforms since he joined Seoul National University (SNU) in 1992. Since 2014, he has been into the next phase of his career, pursuing scalable education of young digital innovators while researching on the next-generation digitalization platform technology.

His pioneering outlier life began with founding Transact In Memory, Inc. in Silicon Valley in early 2000’s to materialize his group’s innovative research publications in SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE into his second-generation system called P*TIME. In late 2005, German software company SAP secretly bought his start up as well as his vision of real-time in-memory platform paradigm.

In the first quarter of 2006, P*TIME was integrated into SAP’s ERP stack as the world’s first modern enterprise-scale in-memory DBMS. This historical achievement, although eight years ahead of the next comparable product, was unfortunately known to only a small circle of SAP’s top management and developers because of non-disclosure agreement. P*TIME’s pioneering features included in-memory-optimized MVCC, a novel compressed B+-tree with cache-conscious optimistic index concurrency control, parallel logging for scalable update performance, and parallel recovery of large in-memory data volume.

After leading this initial phase of SAP’s R&D toward the new in-memory paradigm, he took charge of SAP’s internal research for integrated in-memory transactional and analytical platform. Based on this research, from 2009 to early 2014, he co-led the development of SAP HANA, which triggered the enterprise software industry to shift to the in-memory paradigm. With the success of HANA, SAP has now become the most valuable German company with ~120 billion Euro market value.

After his dream of in-memory paradigm shift achieved with SAP HANA’s support for operational enterprise database such as ERP, in 2014, he fully returned to SNU and founded Big Data Institute to lead trans-disciplinary digital transformation research and education across all academic disciplines. In 2017, he founded SNU urban data science laboratory in the downtown Seoul with funding from Seoul city government, and the fourth industrial revolution academy transforming young people into digital innovators.

With his past outlier experience, he served on the board of trustees of SNU from December 2014 to 2016. He is the longest-serving board member of Korea Telecom since March 2012. From June 2017, he serves as the chair of digitalization of Korea Electric Power Company. In his spare time, he advises various Korean government ministries and companies.

Prof. Cha received his BS and MS from Seoul National University in 1980 and 1982, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991. He was on the editorial board of VLDB Journal from 2009 to 2015. He was a general co-chair of 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering in Seoul, which drew 630 participants, a historical record in the past ten years. Since then he became a member of IEEE ICDE Steering committee. In 2017, Professor Cha was offered an invitation of chief scientist in one of Chinese research institutions under Thousand Talents Program.

Jingren Zhou is Vice President at Alibaba Group. He is responsible for driving Big Data and AI infrastructure development at Alibaba. Specifically, he manages the cloud engineering team to develop cloud-scale distributed computing platform, data analytic products, and various business solutions. He is also Head of the Search Division at Alibaba, leading the search engineering team to develop advanced techniques for personalized e-commerce and multimedia search, and provide best-in-class shopping experience at Alibaba's e-commerce platforms, including Taobao and Tmall. His research interests include cloud-computing, distributed systems, databases and large scale machine learning. Dr. Zhou received his PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University.