Pan Hui | |
---|---|
Nationality | Hong Kong SAR |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge University of Hong Kong |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mobile computing Networking Augmented reality Data science |
Institutions | University of Helsinki The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
Thesis | People are the network: experimental design and evaluation of social-based forwarding algorithms (2008) |
Doctoral advisor | Jon Crowcroft [1] |
Pan Hui is a computer scientist at the University of Helsinki and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Currently, he is a Chair Professor of Computational Media and Arts (CMA), a Chair Professor of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas, Director of the Center for Metaverse and Computational Creativity, and also Director of the HKUST-DT Systems and Media Laboratory (SyMLab) at HKUST. He was elected as an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2020, [2] a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (FIEEE), [3] a Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE), [4] and a Distinguished Scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). [5] He has been elected to the endowed professorship Nokia Chair in Data Science. [6]
Hui is recognized as a foundational researcher in the field of networking and communications, especially in mobile computing and networking. His work spans a wide spectrum from foundational work on mobility characterization and networking approaches, to the design and development of software systems, to conceptualization and deployment of innovative applications. With the vision of a perceived virtual universe that is rich in 'Surreality', he has been leading the cutting-edge research on Metaverse, [7] making global impact on shaping the future of Metaverse development.
Hui has extensively contributed to the foundation of opportunistic networking, including empirical measurements, mobility modeling, bridging mobile networks with social networks, and innovative applications. He is considered a pioneer in bridging the mobile and social networks research fields. In particular, on the conceptual front, he elucidated the connection between social networks and mobile networks. On the empirical side, by measuring human mobility and contact patterns, he laid the foundation for the use of mobility traces as a means for validating models that are widely used for performance evaluation. His papers published at ACM SIGCOMM workshop 2005 [8] (over 1,350 citations by Jan 2023) and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 2007 [9] (over 2,030 citations by Jan 2023) empirically demonstrated that the human mobility inter-contact time follows a power-law distribution, rather than a commonly-believed exponential distribution.
Hui's work in mobile offloading at Deutsche Telekom has resulted in three practical systems for mobile traffic offloading from cellular networks to both WiFi networks and device-to-device networks and also for computation offloading from smartphones and wearable devices to the cloud and edge servers. His ThinkAir paper on a mobile cloud offloading system [10] (a result from a Deutsche Telekom innovation development project), with over 1400 citations by Jan 2023, is the most cited paper in IEEE Infocom 2012 conference and the system is widely adopted by the mobile cloud/edge computing community.
In terms of metaverse, Hui envisions a perceived virtual universe that is rich in 'Surreality', and is a result of a series of connected, shared, and concurrent 3D virtual spaces that are self-sustaining. Following this vision, he has been leading the Metaverse research that makes a global impact on shaping the future of Metaverse development. In terms of technology, his bottom-up approach to Augmented Reality (AR) research has resulted in an open software CloudAR which contains a platform and an SDK to speed up mobile AR development by an order of magnitude. [11] He has also invented many innovative AR/VR applications including augmented driving, gesture control, social interaction, visual privacy protection, and assisted applications for the elderly and the visually impaired.
He proposed and defined the concept of "Metaformation" (or "Meta-shaping") as the process of transforming physical space into a hybrid physical-digital Metaverse, which facilitates the cohabitation of both human and digital natives, wherein the virtual world interacts and coexists with the physical world and results in a highly engaging and seamless experience. [12] He also served as a member in the Global Future Council on the Future of Metaverse in the World Economic Forum. [13]
Hui is leading one of the key projects at HKUST, 'MetaHKUST', [14] to bring two HKUST campuses (Clear Water Bay and Guangzhou) together and consolidate the real and virtual experience in one platform. The MetaHKUST project is receiving international press coverage and highlights the use of the metaverse in the education and learning industry. [15] [16] In 2024, Hui led a team to introduce Asia's First 'AI Lecturers' in Class. [17] [18] [19] They develop 10 AI lecturers with different combinations of gender, age, and race using a self-developed variational 3D full-body generator combined with multiple AI tools including Midjourney, ChatGPT, Sadtalker, and the team's enhanced version of the open-source 3D facial animation tool EmoTalk. In his 'Social Media for Creatives' course, these AI lecturers are used to teach 30 postgraduate students about immersive technologies and the impact of digital platforms.
The annual SIGCOMM Awardfor Lifetime Contribution recognizes lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks. The award is presented in the annual SIGCOMM Technical Conference.
Edge computing is a distributed computing model that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data. More broadly, it refers to any design that pushes computation physically closer to a user, so as to reduce the latency compared to when an application runs on a centralized data centre.
Michael George Luby is a mathematician and computer scientist, CEO of BitRipple, senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), former VP Technology at Qualcomm, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Digital Fountain. In coding theory he is known for leading the invention of the Tornado codes and the LT codes. In cryptography he is known for his contributions showing that any one-way function can be used as the basis for private cryptography, and for his analysis, in collaboration with Charles Rackoff, of the Feistel cipher construction. His distributed algorithm to find a maximal independent set in a computer network has also been influential.
Routing in delay-tolerant networking concerns itself with the ability to transport, or route, data from a source to a destination, which is a fundamental ability all communication networks must have. Delay- and disruption-tolerant networks (DTNs) are characterized by their lack of connectivity, resulting in a lack of instantaneous end-to-end paths. In these challenging environments, popular ad hoc routing protocols such as AODV and DSR fail to establish routes. This is due to these protocols trying to first establish a complete route and then, after the route has been established, forward the actual data. However, when instantaneous end-to-end paths are difficult or impossible to establish, routing protocols must take to a "store and forward" approach, where data is incrementally moved and stored throughout the network in hopes that it will eventually reach its destination. A common technique used to maximize the probability of a message being successfully transferred is to replicate many copies of the message in hopes that one will succeed in reaching its destination.
Jonathan Andrew Crowcroft is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, a visiting professor at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, and the chair of the programme committee at the Alan Turing Institute.
Mobile data offloading is the use of complementary network technologies for delivering data originally targeted for cellular networks. Offloading reduces the amount of data being carried on the cellular bands, freeing bandwidth for other users. It is also used in situations where local cell reception may be poor, allowing the user to connect via wired services with better connectivity.
Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the combination of cloud computing and mobile computing to bring rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. The ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile applications on a plethora of mobile devices, with a rich user experience. MCC provides business opportunities for mobile network operators as well as cloud providers. More comprehensively, MCC can be defined as "a rich mobile computing technology that leverages unified elastic resources of varied clouds and network technologies toward unrestricted functionality, storage, and mobility to serve a multitude of mobile devices anywhere, anytime through the channel of Ethernet or Internet regardless of heterogeneous environments and platforms based on the pay-as-you-use principle."
Qiang Yang is the Chair Professor, Department Head of CSE, HKUST in Hong Kong and University New Bright Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor from 2015. He was the founding head of Noah's Ark Lab. He had taught at the University of Waterloo and Simon Fraser University. His research interests are data mining and artificial intelligence.
Opportunistic mobile social networks are a form of mobile ad hoc networks that exploit the human social characteristics, such as similarities, daily routines, mobility patterns, and interests to perform the message routing and data sharing. In such networks, the users with mobile devices are able to form on-the-fly social networks to communicate with each other and share data objects.
Multi-access edge computing (MEC), formerly mobile edge computing, is an ETSI-defined network architecture concept that enables cloud computing capabilities and an IT service environment at the edge of the cellular network and, more in general at the edge of any network. The basic idea behind MEC is that by running applications and performing related processing tasks closer to the cellular customer, network congestion is reduced and applications perform better. MEC technology is designed to be implemented at the cellular base stations or other edge nodes, and enables flexible and rapid deployment of new applications and services for customers. Combining elements of information technology and telecommunications networking, MEC also allows cellular operators to open their radio access network (RAN) to authorized third parties, such as application developers and content providers.
Victor Bahl is an American Technical Fellow and CTO of Azure for Operators at Microsoft. He started networking research at Microsoft. He is known for his research contributions to white space radio data networks, radio signal-strength based indoor positioning systems, multi-radio wireless systems, wireless network virtualization, edge computing, and for bringing wireless links into the datacenter. He is also known for his leadership of the mobile computing community as the co-founder of the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing (SIGMOBILE). He is the founder of international conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services Conference (MobiSys), and the founder of ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, a quarterly scientific journal that publishes peer-reviewed technical papers, opinion columns, and news stories related to wireless communications and mobility. Bahl has received important awards; delivered dozens of keynotes and plenary talks at conferences and workshops; delivered over six dozen distinguished seminars at universities; written over hundred papers with more than 65,000 citations and awarded over 100 US and international patents. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A cloudlet is a mobility-enhanced small-scale cloud datacenter that is located at the edge of the Internet. The main purpose of the cloudlet is supporting resource-intensive and interactive mobile applications by providing powerful computing resources to mobile devices with lower latency. It is a new architectural element that extends today's cloud computing infrastructure. It represents the middle tier of a 3-tier hierarchy: mobile device - cloudlet - cloud. A cloudlet can be viewed as a data center in a box whose goal is to bring the cloud closer. The cloudlet term was first coined by M. Satyanarayanan, Victor Bahl, Ramón Cáceres, and Nigel Davies, and a prototype implementation is developed by Carnegie Mellon University as a research project. The concept of cloudlet is also known as follow me cloud, and mobile micro-cloud.
Albert Greenberg is an American software engineer and computer scientist who is notable for his contributions to the design of operating carrier and datacenter networks as well as to advances in computer networking and cloud computing. He currently serves as Vice President of Platform Engineering at Uber.
Venkata Narayana Padmanabhan is a computer scientist and principal researcher at Microsoft Research India. He is known for his research in networked and mobile systems. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 2016.
Yunhao Liu is a Chinese computer scientist. He is the Dean of Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) at Tsinghua University.
Zygmunt J. Haas is a professor and distinguished chair in computer science, University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) also the professor emeritus in electrical and computer engineering, Cornell University. His research interests include ad hoc networks, wireless networks, sensor networks, and zone routing protocols.
Ashutosh Dutta is a computer scientist, engineer, academic, author, and an IEEE leader. He is currently a Senior Scientist, 5G Chief Strategist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, APL Sabbatical Fellow, Adjunct Faculty and Director of the Doctor of Engineering Program at Johns Hopkins University. He formerly served as the ECE Chair for EP at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Chair of IEEE Industry Connection O-RAN Initiative and the Founding Co-Chair for the IEEE Future Networks Initiative. He also serves as the co-chair for the IEEE 5G/6G innovation Testbed.
Ranveer Chandra is an Indian American computer scientist who is Managing Director of the Research for Industry group at Microsoft and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. He is known for his contributions to software-defined networking, wireless networks and digital agriculture. Previously, he served as the Chief Scientist at Microsoft Azure Global and currently holds the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Agri-Food at Microsoft.
Khaled B. Letaief is an academic who is the New Bright Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong. His research lies in the general area of wireless communications and networks, with research interests in AI and machine learning, mobile cloud and edge computing, tactile internet, and 6G systems. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since 2003, and an international member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE) since 2021.
Guo Yike is a Chinese computer scientist who currently serves as provost of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) since 1 December 2022. He is concurrently a chair professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of HKUST.