Hong Zhang

Before joining the University of Waterloo as an Assistant Professor, Dr. Hong Zhang was a postdoctoral fellow at the RISELab at UC Berkeley, where he collaborated with Professor Ion Stoica. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he worked with Professor Kai Chen in the System networkING (SING) research group.

Dr. Zhang's research centers on the development of application-oriented design principles for big data and machine learning systems. His work focuses on fully leveraging application-specific structures—such as communication patterns, execution dependencies, and machine learning model architectures—to meet unique performance requirements. This approach has resulted in the creation of several scalable systems, featuring theoretically sound scheduling algorithms tailored to the demands of various big data and machine learning applications.