H. T. Kung

Who is H. T. Kung?

H. T. Kung is a computer scientist. His current research is primarily in the area of communications networks and network security, but his interests have been broad-ranging, including computational complexity theory, database theory, VLSI design, and parallel computing.

Kung received his bachelor degree from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, and first taught there, where his research included work on novel parallel computers and the popularization of the Systolic array. He joined Harvard University in 1992, where he is currently the William H. Gates Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Kung also is co-chair of Harvard's "PhD in Information, Technology and Management" Program.

Kung is a member of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and also of the National Academy of Engineering in the U.S.A.. He is a recipient of the Inventor of the Year Award by the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association in 1991.

Kung's contributions include: Systolic Arrays; iWarp; Optimistic Concurrency Control, a core principal underlying many transactional memory and database implementations, including Google App Engine, and Ruby on Rails's data management protocol; Read-Copy-Update, a mutual exclusion synchronization method, deployed in the modern Linux kernel; Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing, a location-based routing protocol for mesh networks; a communication-avoiding optimal distributed matrix multiplication algorithm; the Kung-Traub algorithm for comparing the expansion of an algebraic function; etc.