Kai Li, an expert in computer architecture and distributed systems, has been named a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is one of four Princeton faculty members elected to the academy this year.
The academy’s class of 2025 includes nearly 250 scholars, scientists, artists and leaders in the public, nonprofit and private sectors. Founded in 1780, the academy honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to “advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.”
Li, the Paul M. Wythes ’55 P'86 and Marcia R. Wythes P’86 Professor in Computer Science, joined the Princeton faculty in 1986. Over his career, he has contributed to several areas in computer science, including distributed systems, computer architecture, storage systems and machine learning.
In distributed systems, Li was one of the earliest advocates for using compute clusters to solve large-scale problems in parallel. He proposed the first system that allows users to program using a shared-memory programming model on computer clusters. In computer architecture, Li led the development of a user-level communication mechanism, which later evolved into the Remote Direct Memory Access networking standard widely used in modern data centers.
In storage systems, he pioneered deduplication storage systems for efficient backup and remote data replication, revolutionizing data protection by eliminating reliance on tape-based systems. In machine learning, he contributed to the development of ImageNet, a computer vision database which sparked a revolution in deep learning.
Li has received numerous honors and awards, including eight most influential or test-of-time paper awards. He has been elected a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Li received his doctorate from Yale, a master’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China and a bachelor’s degree from Jilin University in China.
Other recipients from Princeton this year are William Bialek, Peter Singer and Christopher Skinner.