On Dec 7, 2021, Ion Stoica, professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and leader of RISELab, was appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, School of Software. The appointment ceremony was held online, as well as at Tsinghua East Main Building. It was hosted by Professor Li Jinliang, Dean of International Affairs, Tsinghua University and academician Sun Jiaguang, who is in charge of Tsinghua Big Data Research Centre.

In his opening remarks, Professor Li Jinliang said that Tsinghua is truly honored to invite Stoica to conduct collaborative research and impart knowledge to Tsinghua students. Apart from his research work at RISELab, Stoica is also a co-founder of Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013), and Conviva Networks (2006). His foundational work in Big Data systems has great impact to both academia and the industrial innovation.

Subsequently, Professor Sun Jianguang presented Stoica with his certificate of appointment as a Distinguished Visiting Professor. He welcomed Stoica to the university and encouraged Tsinghua students to stick to the school's culture of learning by doing, and learning software engineering skill by system building.

In his talk, Stoica presented several projects under development at RISELab at UC Berkeley, including systems to better support machine learning (ML) workloads, and leveraging ML to build better systems. Stoica first presented Ray, a general-purpose distributed system which provides both task-parallel and actor abstractions. Then, he discussed the key features of Balsa, a system that learns a database query optimizer from scratch, and NeuroCuts, a tool that generates decision trees for network packet classifiers.

Around 100 researchers and students all over the world attended the ceremony and the research seminar.

Ion Stoica introduces Projects at RISELab

Ion Stoica is a professor in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and the director of RISELab (https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/). He is currently doing research on cloud computing and AI systems. Past work includes Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, Tachyon, Chord DHT, and Dynamic Packet State (DPS). He is an ACM Fellow, an honorary member of the Romanian Academy, and has received numerous awards, including the Mark Weiser Award (2019), SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2015), and several "Test of Time" awards. He also co-founded three companies, Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013) and Conviva (2006).

Editor: Li Han