H. T. Kung

Hsiang-Tsung Kung (Chinese: 孔祥重; pinyin: Kǒng Xiángzhòng; born November 9, 1945) is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array in 1979, which has since become a core computational component of hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence, including Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Similarly, he proposed optimistic concurrency control in 1981, now a key principle in memory and database transaction systems, including MySQL, Apache CouchDB, Google's App Engine, and Ruby on Rails. He remains an active researcher, with ongoing contributions to computational complexity theory, hardware design, parallel computing, routing, wireless communication, signal processing, and artificial intelligence.

Kung is well-known as an influential mentor. His 1987 advice on Ph.D. research remains well cited. Throughout his career, he has been equally regarded for the role of his own research as for the legacy of his students, who have gone on to become pillars at Y Combinator, Google Brain, IBM, Intel, Akamai, MediaTek, Stanford, and MIT.

He was elected a member of the US National Academy of Engineering 1993 for introducing the idea of systolic computation, contributions to parallel computing, and applying complexity analysis to very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) computation. Kung is also a Guggenheim Fellow, member of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and president of the Taiwan AI Academy. He has been awarded the IEEE Charles Babbage award, Inventor of the Year by the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association in 1991, and the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame award in 2015.