Picture of Heming Cui
Name of Heming Cui

Department of Computer Science
The University of Hong Kong (HKU)

Room 421, Chow Yei Ching Building, HKU, Pok Fu Lam Road, Hong Kong

Email of Heming Cui

[ Resume | Publication | Research Lab | Admitting New Students ]

I am an associate professor in HKU CS. I got my bachelor and master degrees from Tsinghua University; I joined HKU in January 2015 right after I got my PhD degree from Columbia University (my PhD supervisor is Prof. Junfeng Yang). I lead the HKU Systems Software Lab. I am interested in building parallel and distributed systems, including blockchain systems, distributed AI training/serving systems, distributed big-data and parallel computing systems, and cloud computing systems. I have a particular focus on improving the reliability, security, and performance of these systems. I publish papers in broad areas of systems, security, and networking, including SOSP, NSDI, ASPLOS, ATC, EuroSys, DSN, TPDS, and TDSC. In recent three years, I serve on the program committees of international systems/networking conferences, including OSDI, NSDI, ATC, DSN, EuroSys, SOCC, and ICDCS. I also serve as constant reviewers for international systems/networking/software/security journals, including TPDS, TOCS, TSE, TON, TMC, and TDSC. I receive several world-wide competative research awards, including a Croucher Innovation Award in 2016 (HK $5 million), an outstanding (best) paper award from ACSAC '17, two Huawei flagship research grants in 2018 (blockchain and security) and 2021 (AI), and the Best Collaborating Scientist Medal from the Huawei Theory Lab in 2021, and the RGC Research Impact Fund (RIF) in 2023 (HK $4.3 million). He is the project leader of a National Key R&D Program of China 2030 (the project topic is about building new parallel training systems for large AI models). As (one of) the project leaders or principle investigators, Dr. Cui's total amount of competative research grants in Hong Kong and mainland China has reached about HK $90 million.

My recent research papers have led to commercial software releases with global leading IT industries. For instance, My secure system papers (e.g., [Uranus AsiaCCS 2020] and [DAENet TDSC 2021]) on Trusted Execution Environments have become a core component of Huawei's Trusted and Intelligent Cloud Services (see the UTEE component in TICS). In addition, my students and I are actively collaborating with industries to jointly publish research papers and to transfer the resultant systems from these papers into commercial software of broad areas, including distributed AI training systems, permissioned blockchain systems, security and privacy preserving systems, and geo distributed transaction systems.

I admit several PhD students every year. I expect my students to have good skills/experience on hacking systems software (e.g., Linux kernel, LLVM, or distributed protocols) or AI frameworks, and have strong motivation on research. If you are interested, please directly apply here and select "systems and networking research" as your interested field during the application. If you also want to talk with me individually, please read my recent papers (at least several times for each paper), understand how they work deeply, compile and run them, and then email me what new research topics you can think of (e.g., new applications or significant improvments of my systems, or some other relevant and crazy ideas). I will reply your email quickly if your ideas make sense. I also recruit postdoc of broad systems and networking areas. Please read my papers, form a few short research proposals (ideas/plans) within the intersections of your work and my work, and send me your CV with the proposals.

I have several well funded research grants that can support student Research Assistants (RAs) and summer research interns for students around the world. If you are interested and you can work full-time in HKU for a few months, you can send me emails with your CV and thoughts on my papers.

Selected Publication ("*" means corresponding author)



Members in My HKU Systems Software Lab

Lab logo

Group photo

Prof. Yuexuan Wang (Professor in Zhejiang University, visiting scholar)
Shengliang Deng (PhD student)
Tianyang Duan (MPhil student)
Yichao Fu (PhD student)
Ruijie Gong (PhD student)
Rongxin Guan (MPhil student)
Xiuxian Guan (PhD student)
Dong Huang (PhD student)
Jianyu Jiang (PhD student)
Fanxin Li (PhD student)
Ji Qi (PhD student)
Yuhao Qing (PhD student)
Mingde Ren (PhD student)
Tianxiang Shen (PhD student)
Haoze Song (PhD student)
Zekai Sun (PhD student)
Junming Wang (MPhil student)
Xian Wang (PhD student)
Siyuan Wen (MPhil student)
Mingyuan Wu (PhD student)
Bocheng Xiao (PhD student)
Zongyuan Zhang (MPhil student)
Shixiong Zhao (PhD student)



Alumni

Xusheng Chen (PhD student, graduated, joined Huawei via the Top Minds program)
Tsz On Li (MPhil student, graduated)
Cheng Wang (PhD student, graduated, joined Huawei)



Admitting New Students

My academic talk about building supporting systems for securing big-data and AI computing on public clouds in Huawei Strategy and Technology Workshop (STW), Sep 2022
My academic talk about building multi-dimentional parallel training systems for big AI models in Imperial College London, May 2021
My keynote speech on building multi-dimentional parallel training systems for big AI models in the OS2ATC conference, December 2021
My academic talk for CS undergraduate students in USTC, China, January 2021


Misc

Methods of doing systems research and writing papers