Dr. Wesley W. Chu

A Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) and past chairman (1988 to 1991) of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his B.S.E. and M.S.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1960 and 1961, respectively; and received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1966. Early in his career, he worked on the design of large-scale computers at IBM; this was followed by a three-year stint at Bell Laboratories and a focus on computer communications and distributed databases. He joined the faculty of UCLA in 1969 and later served as department chair for three years. His early research focus was on computer communication and networks, distributed databases, memory management, real-time distributed processing systems, and statistical multiplexing - the latter contributing to the development of ATM networks. His pioneering work in file allocation and directory design for distributed databases aided the design and development of domain name servers for the web and current cloud computing systems. He was named an IEEE Fellow for his contributions in these areas. Over the past two decades, his research interests evolved to include intelligent (knowledge-based) information systems and knowledge acquisition for large information systems. Using his methodology for relaxing query constraints, he led the development of CoBase, a cooperative database system for structured data, and KMed, a knowledge-based multimedia medical image system. Under the KMed project, a Medical Digital Library (which consists of structured data, text documents, and images) was developed that provides approximate content-matching and navigation. The system provides approximate content-matching and navigation and serves as a cornerstone for future paperless hospitals. In recent years, he also worked on inference techniques for data security and privacy protection (ISP) and Social Network-Based Recommender System (SNRS). He is the author or co-author of more than 150 articles, an editor of three textbooks on information technology, and the co-editor of a reference book on data mining. He has received best paper awards at the 19th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling in 2000 for his work (coauthored with D. Lee) on XML/Relational schema transformation. Together with his students, he has received numerous best paper awards at the American Medical Information Association Congress in 2002 and 2003 for indexing and retrieval of medical free text, and they have also been awarded a "Certificate of Merit" for the Medical Digital Library demo system at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in 2003. He is the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award, ?For contributions to Intelligent Information Systems?. Service to the technology community has been a significant factor in his career: ACM SIGCOMM Chairman for three years; Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers for Computer Networking and Distributed Processing Systems for four years; Chair, co-Chair or Technical Chair of numerous workshops and conferences on systems management, data communications, very-large databases, information knowledge sharing, and entity relationships. For his services to IEEE, he received both a meritorious award and a certificate of appreciation.