Believe it or not, my first paid job was a tractor driver on a farm in northern China. Hard work, good luck, and especially great help from many great people transformed me to a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. I received my PhD degree in computer science from MIT in 1989 and joined Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a
member of research staff. My work at Xerox PARC included analysis of
TCP traffic dynamics, reliable multicast protocols, and
designs of Internet integrated services support; the RSVP protocol was
conceived and developed as part of this effort.
I started teaching in UCLA's Computer Science Department in January 1996. My research at UCLA started with the design of a global scale web caching system, Adaptive Web Caching (AWC) funded by DARPA (joint work with Van Jacobson and Sally Floyd) and the Internet Distance Map Service funded by NSF(joint work with Paul Francis and Sugih Jamin). A direct follow up project to AWC was GRAB, "Reliable and Robust Sensor Data Collection by Gradient Broadcast" funded by DARPA. In parallel, we also launched efforts on the investigation of fault tolerance of the Internet routing infrastructure.
I coined the phrase "middlebox" in 1999, referring to the new components that were not in the original IP architecture but popped up in many places (web proxies, firewalls, NAT boxes). I used the phrase "Middlebox" in discussions at the IRTF End-to-End research group meetings. Much to my own surprise, the word was quickly picked up by IETF and it is now used in many IETF documentations.
My students and I are currently tackling resiliency and security issues in the Internet infrastructure, such as the global routing system and Domain Name System (DNS), and the system challenges in deploying cryptographic protections in global scale open systems such as the Internet.
I am currently serving on the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and co-chairing the IRTF Routing Research Group. I am also a member of the Scientific Council of the international research institute IMDEA Networks, and a member of the Asia Future Internet Board. Previously I served as the vice chair of ACM SIGCOMM (1999-2003), Co-Chair of IEEE Communication Society Internet Technical Committee (1995-2000), Associate Editor for ACM Computer Communication Review (1991-1999), and also served on the Editorial Board for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (1992-1998). I am an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow.