Feng Zhao

Assistant Managing Director
Microsoft Research Asia

Editor-In-Chief, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
Steering Committee Chair, ACM/IEEE IPSN
Technical Program Committee Co-Chair, ACM Sensys'05
Executive Committee, ACM SIGBED

Address:
Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399, USA
Tel. 425-706-8777; Fax: 425-936-7329

I am an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia, where I oversee multiple research areas including systems, wireless and networking, hardware computing, and media communications. My own research has focused on networked embedded systems such as sensor networks, energy and resource management of distributed systems as in data centers and cloud computing, and mobile devices and mobility. I have also done work on parallel computing, fast N-body algorithms, machine recognition and diagnostics.

Prior to Microsoft Research Asia, I was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, where I founded and managed the Networked Embedded Computing Group. The group has developed the MSR sensor mote, tiny Web Service, SenseWeb and SensorMap, Data Center Genome, JouleMeter, and GAMPS data compression.  With the help of some of these technologies, today the Microsoft data centers are among the most densely instrumented and monitored cloud computing infrastructures in the world.

I received my PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, have taught at Stanford University and Ohio State University, and currently also serve as an Affiliate Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Washington and an adjunct Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I was a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC and founded PARC’s research effort in sensor networks and distributed diagnostics. I serve as the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, and have authored or co-authored over 100 technical papers and books, including a book published by Morgan Kaufmann — Wireless Sensor Networks: An information processing approach. I received a Sloan Research Fellowship and NSF and ONR Young Investigator Awards, and was named as an ACM Distinguished Engineer in 2006. My work has been featured in news media such as BBC World News, BusinessWeek, and Technology Review.

Full biographical sketch

News | Talks | Book | Publications

News

• HotPower'09, to be co-located with SOSP'09, October 10, 2009.
• I organized HotPower'08 which was co-located with OSDI'08, December 7, 2008.
• Microsoft Researchers Develop Ways to Save Energy in Data Centers, Technology Review, March 11, 2008.
• An insider's look at Microsoft's latest gizmos, CNET, March 11, 2008
• Sensor Network Academic Resource Kit 2007 released, July 2007
• mPlatform: A Lego-Like Approach to Sensor Research by Rob Knies, June 1, 2007
• SensorMap: Browsing the Physical World in Real-Time: an External Research Program with 11 universities worldwide.
• SenseWeb Project was cited in "The Year in Infotech", MIT Technology Review, December 2006
• mPlatform, a heterogeneous multi-processor embedded platform, was developed, September 2006
• SensorMap, a wide-area sensor web for publishing and browsing live sensor data from the SenseWeb Project
• UW/MSR Summer Institute on World-Wide Sensor Web, August 6-9, 2006, Semiahmoo, Washington, USA.
• MSR Sense Toolkit, a collection of tools for sensornet data collection, processing and visualization, released on December 16, 2005
• Sensor Networks Get a Kick-Start, by Rob Knies
• Microsoft Research Sensor Networks Workshop 2005, October 10-11, 2005, Woodinville, Washington, USA
• How to Build a Smart World, by Suzanne Ross of Microsoft Research News

Recent Talks

• Energy Efficiency:  from tiny embedded devices to warehouse sized data centers, Talk at CMU Joint SDI and Intelligence Seminar, May 13, 2008.
• Wireless Sensor Network and How It Enables Greening Computing and Living, Talks at Distinguished CS Lecture Series, University of Minnesota, April 11, 2008, and Stanford Networking Seminar, February 28, 2008.
• Sensornet 2.0: the new frontier, Keynote at the 27th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS'06), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, December 6, 2006.
• Recent Progress on Sensor Networks and Embedded Computing, Talk at Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2006, Redmond, WA, July 18, 2006.
• Sensors meet World Wide Web: searching and organizing world’s real-time information, Keynote at IEEE International Conference on Sensor Networks, Ubiquitous and Trustworthy Computing (SUTC’06), Taiwan, June 5, 2006
• Challenge Problems in Sensornet Research, Keynote at NSF NOSS PI meeting at Harvard and Distinguished Lectures at Johns Hopkins and Princeton, October 18-21, 2005.
• Challenges in Programming Sensor Networks, Keynote at International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), Los Angeles, July 1, 2005.
• Wireless Sensor Networks: Seamless computing across the physical and PC worlds, Talk at Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2004, Redmond, WA, August 2, 2004 (Abstract).
• Challenges in Designing Information Processing Sensor Networks, Talk at NSF Workshop on Networking of Sensor Systems, Marina Del Rey, California, February 20, 2004.

Book: Feng Zhao and Leonidas Guibas, Wireless Sensor Networks: An Information Processing Approach. Morgan Kaufmann (ISBN 1-55860-914-8), 2004.

    The book is based on a class Leo and I have been teaching at Stanford.

Selected Recent Publications

(Full publication list)

• Shekhar Srikantaiah, Aman Kansal, Feng Zhao, "Energy Aware Consolidation for Cloud Computing,"  HotPower’08,  December 2008.
• Sebastian Michel et al, "Environmental Monitoring 2.0," Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '09), March 2009. Demo paper.
• Bodhi Priyantha, Aman Kansal, Michel Goraczko, and Feng Zhao, "Tiny Web Services: Design and Implementation on Interoperable and Evolvable Sensor Networks," ACM Sensys, Nov 5-7, 2008, Raleigh, NC, USA.
• Liqian Luo, Aman Kansal, Suman Nath, and Feng Zhao, "Sharing and Exploring Sensor Streams over Geocentric Interfaces,"  Proceedings of 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS '08), November 2008.
• Feng Zhao, "The Physical Side of Computing." Communications of the ACM, Perspective, July 2008
• Jie Liu and Feng Zhao, Composing Semantic Services in Open Sensor-Rich Environments, IEEE Network, Vol.22, No. 4, pp. 44-49, July/August 2008.
• Michel Goraczko , Jie Liu, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Slobodan Matic, Bodhi Priyantha, Feng Zhao, " Energy Optimal Software Partitioning in Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Embedded Systems," Proceedings of 45th Design Automation Conference (DAC08), June 2008, Anaheim, CA, USA.
• Aman Kansal and Feng Zhao, " Fine-Grained Energy Profiling for Power-Aware Application Design," ACM Sigmetrics First Workshop on Hot Topics in Measurement & Modeling of Computer Systems (HotMetrics08), June 6, 2008, Annapolis, MD, USA.
• Jie Liu, Bodhi Priyantha, Feng Zhao, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Qiang Wang, and Sean James, " Towards Discovering Data Center Genome Using Sensor Nets," Fifth Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (HotEmNets), June 2-3, Charlottesville, VA, USA.
• Andreas Krause, Eric Horvitz, Aman Kansal, and Feng Zhao, " Toward Community Sensing," ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), April 22-24, 2008, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
• Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Bodhi Priyantha, Michel Goraczko, and Feng Zhao, " Towards Energy Efficient Design of Multi-Radio Platforms for Wireless Sensor Networks," ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), April 22-24, 2008, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
• Bodhi Priyantha, Aman Kansal, Michel Goraczko, and Feng Zhao, " Tiny Web Services for Sensor Device Interoperability," ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Demo Abstract, April 22-24, 2008, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
• Gong Chen, Wenbo He, Jie Liu, Suman Nath, Leonidas Rigas, Lin Xiao, and Feng Zhao, " Energy-Aware Server Provisioning and Load Dispatching for Connection-Intensive Internet Services," 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI'08), April 16–18, 2008, San Francisco, CA, USA.
• David Chu, Feng Zhao, Jie Liu, and Michel Gorczko, " Que: A Sensor Network Rapid Prototyping Tool With Application Experiences From A Data Center Deployment," The 5th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN 2008), Bologna, Italy, 30 Jan-1 Feb, 2008.
• Aman Kansal, Suman Nath, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, " SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing.", IEEE Multimedia. Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 8-13, October-December 2007.
• Suman Nath, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, "SensorMap for Wide-Area Sensor Webs." IEEE Computer Magazine, 40(7), pp. 90-93, July, 2007.
• Aman Kansal and Feng Zhao, " Location and Mobility in a Sensor Network of Mobile Phones." ACM SIGMM 17th International workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio & Video (NOSSDAV), June 4-5, 2007, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA.
• Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Nissanka B. Priyantha, and Feng Zhao, " mPlatform: A Reconfigurable Architecture and Efficient Data Sharing Mechanism for Modular Sensor Nodes." Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2007), Cambridge, MA, April 25-27, 2007.

Programming, Services, and Architectures

• Kamin Whitehouse, Feng Zhao, and Jie Liu, "Semantic Streams: A Framework for Composable Semantic Interpretation of Sensor Data." Proceedings of the 3rd European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN 2006), Zurich, Switzerland, February 13-15, 2006, pp. 5-20. (Also appeared as Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-45, April 2005 and as ACM Sensys'05 Poster Abstract, November 2-4, 2005.)
• Jie Liu and Feng Zhao, "Towards Semantic Services for Sensor-Rich Information Systems, " The 2nd IEEE/CreateNet International Workshop on Broadband Advanced Sensor Networks (Basenets 2005), Boston, MA, Oct. 3, 2005.
• Jie Liu, Maurice Chu, Juan Liu, James Reich, and Feng Zhao, “State-Centric Programming for Sensor-Actuator Network Systems.” IEEE Pervasive Computing, October, 2003, pp.50-62.
• Juan Liu, Jie Liu, James Reich, Patrick Cheung, and Feng Zhao, “Distributed Group Management for Track Initiation and Maintenance in Target Localization Applications,” The 2nd International Workshop on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN’03), Palo Alto, CA, April 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS 2634), Springer-Verlag Heidelberg, pp. 113-128.
• Elaine Cheong, Judy Liebman, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, “TinyGALS: A Programming Model for Event-Driven Embedded Systems”, The 18th ACM Sym­posium on Applied Computing (SAC’03), Melbourne, FL, March, 2003, pp. 698-704.
• Feng Zhao, Chris Bailey-Kellogg, Markus Fromherz, "Physics-based Encapsulation in Embedded Software for Distributed Sensing and Control Applications." Proceedings of the IEEE, 91(1):40-63, Jan. 2002.

Optimization, Coordination, and Tools

• Zoe Abrams, Ho-Lin Chen, Leonidas Guibas, Jie Liu and Feng Zhao, "Kinetically Stable Task Assignment for Networks of Microservers." Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2006), Nashville, TN, April 19-21, 2006.
• Juan Liu, Ying Zhang, and Feng Zhao, "Robust Distributed Node Localization with Error Management." Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (Mobihoc 2006), Florence, Italy, May 22-25, 2006.
• Alec Woo, Siddharth Seth, Tim Olson, Jie Liu and Feng Zhao, "A Spreadsheet Approach to Programming and Managing Sensor Networks." Proceedings of IPSN'06, Track on Sensor Platform, Tools and Design Methods for Networked Embedded Systems (SPOTS 2006), Nashville, TN, April 19-21, 2006.
• Siddharth Seth, Alec Woo, Tim Olson, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, "Demo Abstract: A Spreadsheet Toolkit for Streaming Sensor Data," Demo at The 3rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2005), San Diego, CA, Nov. 2-4, 2005.
• Jie Liu, Elaine Cheong, and Feng Zhao, "Semantics-Based Optimization Across Uncoordinated Tasks in Networked Embedded Systems," Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT 2005), Jersey City, New Jersey, September 18-22, 2005.

Collaborative Processing, Reasoning, and Tracking

• Feng Zhao, Jie Liu, Juan Liu, Leonidas Guibas, and James Reich, “Collaborative Signal and Information Processing: An Information Directed Approach”, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 91. No. 8, August, 2003, pp. 1199-1209.
• Feng  Zhao, Jaewon Shin, and James Reich, "Information-Driven Dynamic Sensor Collaboration for Tracking Applications." IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 19(2):61-72, March 2002.
• Juan Liu, James Reich, and Feng Zhao, "Collaborative In-Network Processing for Target Tracking." EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, 2003(4):378-391, March 2003.
• Maurice Chu, Horst Haussecker, and Feng Zhao, "Scalable information-driven sensor querying and routing for ad hoc heterogeneous sensor networks." Int'l J. High Performance Computing Applications, 16(3):90-110, Fall 2002. Also, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Technical Report P2001-10113, May 2001.
• Jaewon Shin, Leonidas Guibas, and Feng Zhao, ``A Distributed Algorithm for Managing Multi-Target Identities in Wireless Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks.'' Proceedings of 2nd International Workshop on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'03), April, 2003.
• Jie Liu, Patrick Cheung, Leonidas Guibas, and Feng Zhao, "Apply Geometric Duality to Energy Efficient Non-Local Phenomenon Awareness Using Sensor Networks," IEEE Wireless Communication Magazine, special issue on Wireless Sensor Networks: Theory and Systems, Dec. 2004.

Routing and Information Discovery

• Juan Liu, Feng Zhao, and Dragan Petrovic, "Information-directed routing in ad hoc sensor networks." IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Volume 23, Issue 4, April 2005, pp:851-861.
• Qing Fang, Jie Liu, Leonidas Guibas, and Feng Zhao, “RoamHBA: Maintaining Group Connectivity in Sensor Networks,” The 3rd International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN’04), Berkeley, CA, April, 2004.
• Xue Yang, Jie Liu, Feng Zhao, and Nitin Vaidya, “A Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Protocol for Improving Road Safety,” The 1st International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services (Mobiquitous 2004), Boston, MA, Aug. 22-26, 2004.
• Qing Fang, Feng Zhao, and Leonidas Guibas, "Lightweight Sensing and Communication Protocols for Target Enumeration and Aggregation."  The ACM Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc 2003), 2003.

General

• Feng Zhao, "Introduction to ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks." Inaugural Issue, August 2005

Last Updated: 4/2/2009