CS&E Profile: Zhi-Li Zhang

Computer networking and multimedia systems.

Ph.D. 1997, M.S. 1992, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

B.S. 1986, Computer Science, Nanjing University, China

About

Dr. Zhang's research interests lie broadly in computer communication and networks, Internet technology, multimedia and emerging applications. His current research thrusts focus primarily on building highly scalable, resilient and secure Internet infrastructure and mechanisms to enhance Internet service availability, reliability and security. In addition, he’s working on developing next-generation, service-oriented, manageable Internet architectures to provide better support for creation, deployment, operations and management of value-added emerging Internet applications and services.

Zhang has been widely recognized for his work. He received the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award in 1997, McKnight Land-Grant Professorship in 2000, Miller Visiting Professorship at Miller Institute for Basic Sciences (UC Berkeley) in 2004 and IT George Taylor Distinguished Research Award in 2005. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications; including journals, conference/workshop papers, articles, and one book. Zhang was awarded two Best Paper Awards for his research. He has also served on the Editorial Boards of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and Journal of Computer Networks, chaired several conferences and workshops, and is a member of the IEEE and ACM groups.

Research

My main research interests lie in the area of computer networks and real-time, distributed, multimedia systems. One challenging and critical research problem in this area is how to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees to support real-time multimedia applications in the emerging high speed, integrated services packet networks. My research has focused primarily on issues related to this central theme and addresses them from both the standpoint of network systems and of application or end-host systems.

One major research effort is devoted to the investigation of the interplay of scheduling, admission control, resource management, and service/pricing models in supporting QoS guarantees for multimedia applications. Another major area of research is the end system support for real-time transport of multimedia, in particular, variable-bit-rate video. A new paradigm for multimedia information delivery across heterogeneous networks is currently under development based on a novel architecture with integrated end-to-end server and network support for QoS guarantees.

Other research interests include performance evaluation and modeling of computer systems, distributed and parallel computation, applied probability and queueing theory, and theory of computation.