Hui Lei is a Chinese-American

Computer Scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

Software Engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

and Technology Executive. He is known for his work in

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

, and

mobile computing Mobile computing is human–computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage and allow for transmission of data, which can include voice and video transmissions. Mobile computing involves mobile commun ...

. He is a Fellow of 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 other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

(IEEE) and a Director of Engineering at

Meta Platforms Inc Meta Platforms, Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads ...

Education

Lei received a B.S. degree from

Sun Yat-sen University Sun Yat-sen University (; SYSU) is a public university in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education, and co-funded by the Ministry of Education, SASTIND, and Guangdong Provincial Government. The university is p ...

, an M.S. degree from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

, and a Ph.D. degree from

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

, all in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

. His Ph.D. thesis was titled "Uncovering and Exploiting the Intrinsic Correlations Between File References".

Career

Prior to joining Meta, Lei was a vice president at Futurewei Technologies. He was with

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

until 2018, where most recently he was Director and CTO of Watson Health Cloud, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and an IBM Master Inventor. The projects Lei has worked on include R3 Messaging, Mercury, and Mobile Crowdsensing. He has over 90

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s to his credit. Lei was

Editor-in-Chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The editor-in-chief heads all departments of the organization and is held accoun ...

of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing from 2016 to 2019. He served on the board of governors of the IEEE Computer Society from 2021 to 2022.

Honors and awards

Lei was recognized with an IEEE Computer Society T. Michael Elliott Distinguished Service Certificate in 2014. He was admitted to the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core in the same year. He was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2016 "for contributions to scalable and dependable data access in distributed computing systems." He received an IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award in 2017 "for pioneering contributions to scalable access to real-world data."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lei, Hui Fellows of the IEEE American software engineers New York University alumni American computer scientists Columbia University alumni IBM employees IBM Research computer scientists American technology executives Chinese software engineers