H. T. Kung

Hsiang-Tsung Kung (Chinese: 孔祥重; pinyin: Kǒng Xiángzhòng; born 9 November 1945) is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University[2]. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array in 1979, which has since become a core computational component of hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence, including Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)[3]. Similarly, he proposed optimistic concurrency control in 1981, now a key principle in memory and database transaction systems, including MySQL, Apache CouchDB, Google's App Engine, and Ruby on Rails. He remains an active researcher, with ongoing contributions to computational complexity theory, hardware design, parallel computing, routing, wireless communication, signal processing, and artificial intelligence [4].

H. T. Kung
孔祥重[1]
Born (1945-11-09) November 9, 1945
Alma materNational Tsing Hua University
Carnegie Mellon University
AwardsMember of National Academy of Engineering
Academician of Academia Sinica
Guggenheim Fellowship
IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsCarnegie Mellon University
Harvard University
ThesisTopics in Analytic Computational Complexity (1974)
Doctoral advisorJoseph F. Traub
Doctoral studentsBrad Karp
Monica S. Lam
Charles E. Leiserson
Robert T. Morris

Kung is well-known as an influential mentor. His 1987 advice on Ph.D. research remains well cited. Throughout his career, he has been equally regarded for the role of his own research as for the legacy of his students, who have gone on to become pillars at Y Combinator, Google Brain, IBM, Intel, Akamai, MediaTek, Stanford, and MIT.

Kung is a Guggenheim Fellow[5], member of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States, and president of the Taiwan AI Academy[6]. He has been awarded the IEEE Charles Babbage award, Inventor of the Year by the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association in 1991, and the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame award in 2015[7].

Early life and education

Kung was born in Shanghai on November 9, 1945, and grew up in Taiwan. Kung received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from National Tsing Hua University in 1968, before moving to the United States. In 1971, he moved from University of Washington to Carnegie Mellon with Joseph F. Traub, when the latter was appointed head of CMU's computer science department[8]. Kung's graduate research at Carnegie Mellon focused on computational complexity and parallel computation, and he completed his thesis "Topics in Analytic Computation Complexity" in 1973[9].

Professor at Carnegie Mellon

In 1974, Kung and Traub published the Kung-Traub algorithm for solving non-linear equations[10], relying on a key insight that Isaac Newton had overlooked when working on the same problem. His students at Carnegie Mellon included Charles E. Leiserson, with whom he published early work on the systolic array, Monica Lam, and Feng-hsiung Hsu. Leiserson went on to become an MIT professor of computer science and artificial intelligence, and author of the most widely-used algorithms textbook "Introduction to Algorithms," Lam a Stanford Professor and early member of Tensilica Inc., and Hsu the principal designer of IBM Deep Blue, the first computer to beat a chess grandmaster in tournament play. Kung's work during this time is cited in Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, cementing its fundamental importance to the early development of computer science. Kung's other research contributions during this time include the iWarp system architecture, optimistic concurrency control, read-copy-update a mutual exclusion synchronization method used in the Linux kernel, and a communication-avoiding optimal distributed matrix multiplication algorithm[11].

Professor at Harvard University

In 1992, Kung was appointed McKay professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Harvard. He was later elected the William H. Gates chair of computer of science. Kung became advisor to Robert T. Morris after Morris released one of the first ever internet worms. In 1995, while both graduate students of Kung, Morris and Trevor Blackwell teamed with Paul Graham to found Viaweb, which they sold to Yahoo! for $45 million. This windfall seeded Y Combinator, making the three among the most influential forces in Silicon Valley. Morris and Blackwell also worked alongside another of Kung's students Cliff Young who would go on to become chief architect of Google's Tensor Processing Unit. The TPU is one of the first neural network hardware accelerators and implements Kung's systolic array, now a cornerstone technology of the artificial intelligence boom of the 2010s.

Kung's research during this time was also influential in the war over WiMAX wireless technology standards. His work on geographic wireless data routing with Brad Karp produced the GPSR algorithm, a technology underlying ad-hoc and vehicular networks[12]. From 1999-2006, Kung co-chaired a joint Ph.D. program with colleagues at Harvard Business School. Renewed interest in systolic arrays for deep learning has led Kung to again contribute to hardware for artificial intelligence, including distributed and embedded low-precision neural networks.

See also

References
  1. https://www.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5030663
  2. "H.T. Kung". www.seas.harvard.edu. 2019-04-24. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  3. "An in-depth look at Google's first Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)". Google Cloud Blog. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  4. "H. T. Kung - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  5. "Hsiang-Tsung Kung". John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  6. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3297418
  7. "The Hall of Fame Award | ACM SIGOPS". Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  8. "Veteran Computer Researcher H.T. Kung Arrives at Harvard | News | The Harvard Crimson". www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  9. Kung, H. T. (1973). "Topics in analytic computational complexity". search.library.cmu.edu. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  10. Lotfi, Taher; Soleymani, Fazlollah; Mahdiani, Katayoun; Ghorbanzadeh, Mohammad (2016-12-01). "A Class of Kung–Traub-Type Iterative Algorithms for Matrix Inversion". International Journal of Applied and Computational Mathematics. 2 (4): 641–648. doi:10.1007/s40819-015-0083-1. ISSN 2349-5103.
  11. Jia-Wei, Hong; Kung, H. T. (1981). "I/O Complexity: The Red-blue Pebble Game". Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. STOC '81. New York, NY, USA: ACM: 326–333. doi:10.1145/800076.802486.
  12. Katsaros, Konstantinos (2010). "A Survey of Routing Protocols in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks" (PDF). Advances in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks: Developments and Challenges.
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