Here is a bio for a recent award in the US:Kai Li is the Paul M. Wythes ’55, P’86 and Marcia R. Wythes P’86 Professor at Princeton University, where he has been a faculty member since 1986. He earned a B.S. from Jilin University in 1977, an M.S. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1981, and a PhD from Yale University in 1986.He is widely recognized for contributions in three major paradigm shifts in computing. First, he helped drive the shift from specialized supercomputers to networks of commodity computers. In the mid-80s, his PhD work pioneered shared virtual memory, making it easier to develop and run parallel programs and store large AI models across a distributed system. To make clusters competitive with supercomputers, he developed user level direct memory access for low latency communication between computers it later evolved into the RDMA standard, which is widely used in high performance data centers and AI infrastructure. Second, he led the transformation from tape libraries to disk storage. In early 2000, he envisioned replacing data center tape libraries with disk based backup and co-founded Data Domain, Inc. to make the transition possible. He led the development of deduplication technology, which made the transformation economically viable. Within a few years deduplicated storage displaced tape libraries at most data centers while Data Domain held over 60% of the deduplication storage market. Third, he contributed to ImageNet as the co-principal investigator and helped build the ImageNet which sparked the deep learning revolution leading to today's large AI models.He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Chinese National Academy of Engineering as a foreign member. He received the Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale's highest honor for graduate alumni.
