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 did a number of initial IPv6 development projects. Our group was among the first to get on the 6Bone and did the first IPv6 multicast routing implementation, as well as importing vat and sdr to IPv6.
Since 1998 much of our focus has been on the investigation of fault tolerant Internet routing infrastructure. My students and I are currently tackling resiliency and security issues in 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. My group has developed several useful tools, among them are Internet Topology Collection, Link Rank, Cyclops, and SecSpider.
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). Much to my own surprise, the word was quickly picked up by the community and it is now used everywhere. In 2008 IEEE Network dedicated a special issue on the "Implications and Control of Middleboxes in the Internet".
I am currently co-chairing the IRTF Routing Research Group. I am also a member of the Asia Future Internet Board, and a member of the Scientific Council of the international research institute IMDEA Networks. Here is a list of positions I had earlier, and here is a list of my honors and awards.