Ziqiang Hou

Professor of the Institute of Acoustics China Academy of Science. Chairman of KEJIAN Company LTD, President of Shenzhen KEJIAN Holding Company Ltd. Chief Scientist, China Netcom

Prof. Hou is Chairman of the Board of China KEJIAN Company LTD, one of largest cellular handset manufacturer in China. Prof. Hou is also the President of Shenzhen KEJIAN Holding Company Ltd. In addition to his ventures, Prof. Hou currently serves as the Chief Scientist of China Netcom Corporation Ltd., Senior Consultant to National Bureau of Broadcast and TV, and member of information expert group of Shanghai, Tianjin and Shenzhen.

Prof. Hou is a "hands-on" expert in the areas of underwater acoustic technology, digital signal processing and IP networks. He leads a R& D group in digital information consumer electronics products and highspeed IP networks in the DSP center of institute of acoustics of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS). Prof. Hou served as Secretary General of CAS in 1988-1993, and Director of institute of acoustics CAS in 1993-1997.

Prof. Hou is recognized as the pioneer in highspeed IP networks in China. He is the author of a series papers on WAN, MAN and wired and wireless access networks base on highspeed IP technology. China Netcom was founded under his influence.

Prof. Hou is the honorable recipient of the prestigious First Class National Award of Science and Technology Progress.

Zheng Zhang

Research Manager of the System Research Group in Microsoft Research Asia

Zheng entered Fudan EE undergraduate program at 84 and went on to the graduate school at 87, one year ahead of schedule. He was with University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign since 93, and his research interest was in high-performance computer architecture and in particular the memory hierarchies of large-scale shared memory multiprocessors. He researched and published extensively in various areas of cache coherency protocols, and initiated the first study of such systems using commercial applications, which later became the seed for the special workshop in the prestigious ISCA conferences. He joined HP-Labs in the fall of 96 with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineer.

In HP-Labs, he continued researching large-scale multiprocessors and served as consultant to HPs high-end server (Superdome), and contributed in particular to its high-availability solution. His research interest shifted to other areas such as I/O and embedded systems. In 99, he led a research project focusing on building large scale distributed file system and prototyped the DiFFS architecture. Part of the DiFFS technology successfully transferred to the product division and is on the way of being developed as a high-end storage solution. The rest becomes part of the HPs proposal which in later 2001 won the PathForward contract with US National Labs. Since fall of 2001, he led a team focusing on fundamental properties of large scale peer-to-peer systems for planetary computing, and yielded novel solutions for routing, namespace and object placement and a number of other protocols. His current research interest is ultra-large scale distributed system, utilizing and advancing state-of-the-art of peer-to-peer technologies. He has over 30 publications and technical reports as well as patents and invention disclosures, and has served as PC/TPC members for IPTPS, WWW, ICDCS, USENIX MobiSys, WCW etc.