Prof. Li will lecture on “The Transformative Power of Education: From Factory Floors in China to Academic and Entrepreneurial Success in the U.S.” on October 7 at 3:30 pm in Rosenfeld Hall, 109 Grove Street.
Biography
Kai Li has made significant contributions in several areas of computer systems.
His dissertation at Yale pioneered a shared virtual memory system that allowed users to store shared data across a network of computers without physically shared memory. He also led the development of a user-level communication mechanism for such environments, a key idea that became the foundation to the industry standard Infiniband that is now deployed in most hyperscale data centers.
Li also led the development of data deduplication and cofounded Data Domain Inc., which revolutionized storage systems for efficient backup and disaster recovery. He was the co-principal investigator of ImageNet, which propelled deep learning to the forefront of machine learning and sparked what many call the “deep learning revolution.”
Li, who grew up in Chanchun, China, was one of the first group of students to come to the US from China for PhD studies after the Cultural Revolution. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.