Kai Li

Kai Li (born 1954) is a Chinese-American computer scientist and professor of Princeton University.

Kai received his Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1986 and then joined Princeton University.

Prior to that, he received his B.S. degree from Jilin University and M.S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China.

In 1986, Kai Li published his PhD dissertation entitled "Shared Virtual Memory on Loosely Coupled Microprocessors", thus opening up the field of research that is now known as distributed shared memory (DSM) which allows users to program using a shared-memory programming model on clusters.

Since this work, there has been a huge amount of work done to extend the idea to other areas (e.g., distributed object based systems and operating systems) and to improve DSM's performance.

After joining Princeton, Li himself also led the Scalable High-performance Really Inexpensive MultiProcessor (SHRIMP) project, which investigated how to build a high-performance parallel computer on a cluster of PC servers.

A key contributions are virtual-memory mapped communication mechanism to achieve protected user-level communication which contributed significantly to the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) mechanism, in the Virtual Interface Architecture standard, and the Infiniband standard, which are the communication mechanisms for the Direct Access File System (DAFS).

He collaborated with Fei-Fei Li as the co-PI for the ImageNet project to enable the deep learning revolution.

He has made contributions in multiple areas in computer science, including computer architecture, operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, storage systems, machine learning, content-based search, privacy preservation.

He had test-of-time / most influential papers in 7 different areas in computer science (see below).

During his sabbatical from Princeton in 2001, Kai is the principle founder (other co-founders are Brian Biles and Ben Zhu) of Data Domain Incorporation which built the first commercial deduplication storage system, opening up a new billion-dollar market.

He led the initial and subsequent technology innovations for the Data Domain product line.

In Data Domain, he served as initial chief executive officer (CEO) and then chief technology officer (CTO) from October 2001 to August 2002.

Since September 2002, he served as its chief scientist.

Prior to joining Data Domain, he served as an industry consultant of AT&T, Bell Labs, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and NEC.

He served as a director of Pattern Insight Inc. and served as advisory board members of EMC Corporation, Inphi Corporation, Intel research labs, and Open Innovation Center of Samsung Corporation.

He is noted for his work on Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) and co-founding the storage deduplication company Data Domain Inc. which was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2009.

In June 2009, EMC Corporation acquired Data Domain for $2.4 billion, outbidding NetApp's previous offer.

In 2010, Data Domain product line captured 64.2% share of the market for purpose-built backup devices worldwide, including mainframes.

In 2012, Li was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for advances in data storage and distributed computer systems.