DR. H. T. KUNG

Dr. Kung is the William H. Gates Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States, and a Member of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. As a volunteer, he serves as the President of the Taiwan AI Academy, a non-profit organization with campuses in three cities nurturing thousands of AI talents for the industry.

Dr. Kung co-developed optimistic concurrency control, a fundamental principle in memory and database transaction systems, including MySQL, Apache CouchDB, Google’s App Engine, Ruby on Rails, and more. His parallel computing research produced systolic arrays, which have become a core component of hardware accelerators of AI. He remains an active researcher with ongoing contributions to computational complexity theory, AI, signal processing, and many other fields.

Dr. Kung received a Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. degree from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Before joining Harvard, he was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon.