Kai Li (; born 1954) is a

Chinese-American Chinese Americans are Americans of Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans constitute a subgroup of East Asian Americans which also constitute a subgroup of Asian Americans. Many Chinese Americans have ancestors from mainland China, Hong Kong ...

computer scientist and professor of

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

. He is noted for his work on Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) and co-founding the storage deduplication company Data Domain Inc. which was acquired by

EMC Corporation EMC Corporation (stylized as EMC²) was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which sold data storage device, data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other pro ...

in 2009. In 2012, Li was elected as a member into the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

for advances in data storage and distributed computer systems.

Background

Kai received his Ph.D. degree from

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

in 1986 and then joined Princeton University. Prior to that, he received his B.S. degree from

Jilin University Jilin University (JLU) is a public university in the city of Changchun, Jilin, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Construction. History Founded ...

and M.S. degree from

University of Science and Technology of China The University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) is a public university in Hefei, China. It is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and co-funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Education of the People' ...

Academic contribution

In 1986, Kai Li published his PhD dissertation entitled "Shared Virtual Memory on Loosely Coupled Microprocessors", thus opening up the field of research that is now known as

distributed shared memory In computer science, distributed shared memory (DSM) is a form of memory architecture where physically separated memories can be addressed as a single shared address space. The term "shared" does not mean that there is a single centralized memo ...

(DSM) which allows users to program using a shared-memory programming model on clusters. Since this work, there has been a huge amount of work done to extend the idea to other areas (e.g., distributed object based systems and operating systems) and to improve DSM's performance. After joining Princeton, Li himself also led the Scalable High-performance Really Inexpensive MultiProcessor (SHRIMP) project, which investigated how to build a high-performance parallel computer on a cluster of PC servers. Key contributions are virtual-memory mapped communication mechanism to achieve protected user-level communication which contributed significantly to the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) mechanism, in the

Virtual Interface Architecture The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) is an abstract model of a user-level zero-copy network, and is the basis for InfiniBand, iWARP and RoCE. Created by Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq, the original VIA sought to standardize the interface for ...

standard, and the

Infiniband InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

standard, which are the communication mechanisms for the Direct Access File System (DAFS). He collaborated with Fei-Fei Li as the co-PI for the

ImageNet The ImageNet project is a large visual database designed for use in Outline of object recognition, visual object recognition software research. More than 14 million images have been hand-annotated by the project to indicate what objects are pictur ...

project to enable the deep learning revolution. He has made contributions in multiple areas in computer science, including computer architecture, operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, storage systems, machine learning, content-based search, privacy preservation. He had test-of-time / most influential papers in 7 different areas in computer science (see below).

Entrepreneur experience

During his sabbatical from Princeton in 2001, Kai is the principle founder (other co-founders are Brian Biles and Ben Zhu) of Data Domain Corporation which built the first commercial deduplication storage system, opening up a new billion-dollar market. He led the initial and subsequent technology innovations for the Data Domain product line. In June 2009,

acquired Data Domain for $2.4 billion, outbidding

NetApp NetApp, Inc. is an American data infrastructure company that provides unified data storage, integrated data services, and cloud operations (CloudOps) solutions to enterprise customers. The company is based in San Jose, California. It has ranked ...

's previous offer. In 2010, the Data Domain product line captured 64.2% of the market for purpose-built backup devices worldwide, including mainframes. In Data Domain, he served as initial chief executive officer (CEO) and then chief technology officer (CTO) from October 2001 to August 2002. From September 2002 onward, he served as its chief scientist. Prior to joining Data Domain, he served as an industry consultant to

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

, and

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

. He served as a director of Pattern Insight Inc. and served as advisory board members of

Inphi Corporation Inphi Corporation is an American company that produces 10G-800G high-speed analog and mixed-signal semiconductor components and optical subsystems to networking original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), optical module, cloud and telecom service ...

research labs, and Open Innovation Center of

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

Corporation.

Test-of-Time/Influential Papers

* 1998 One of the 43 influential papers in 25 years of the international symposia on Computer architecture. * 2004 One of the 50 influential papers in 20 Years of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. * 2012 ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award. * 2017 VLDB Test-of-Time Award. * 2019 PAMI Longuet-Higgins Prize (Retrospective Most Impactful Paper from CVPR 2009). * 2020 USENIX FAST Test-of-time award. > * 2021 Test-of-time award in 50 years of ICPP.

Selected Honors

* 1998 Elected as an ACM fellow for "fundamental contributions to computer systems and architecture, by introducing and demonstrating the effectiveness of Shared Virtual Memory." * 2011 Elected as an

IEEE fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

for "contributions to distributed shared memory, cluster communication, and deduplication storage systems." * 2012 Elected to the

with citation "for advances in data storage and distributed computer systems."

References

External links

Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Li, Kai 1954 births Living people Computer science educators Princeton University faculty Yale University alumni Chinese emigrants to the United States Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Foreign members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Chinese computer scientists American computer scientists American technology company founders Jilin University alumni University of Science and Technology of China alumni