Wesley Chu

Dr. Wesley W. Chu is a Distinguished Professor and past chairman (1988 to 1991) of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.S.E. (EE) and M.S.E. (EE) from the University of Michigan, and received his Ph.D. (EE) from Stanford University.

From 1964 to 1966, Dr. Chu worked on the design of large-scale computers at IBM in San Jose, California. From 1966 to 1969, he researched computer communications and distributed databases at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. He joined the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969. During the first two decades of his research career, he focused on computer communication and networks, distributed databases, memory management, and real-time distributed processing systems. He has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of statistical multiplexing, which is widely used in current computer communications systems and also influenced the development of the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. He also did pioneering work in file allocation, as well as directory design for distributed databases and task partitioning in real-time distributive systems. This work has influenced and has been applied in the design and development of Domain Name Servers for the web as well as in current peer-to-peer (P2P) and grid systems. Dr. Chu was awarded IEEE fellow for his contribution in these areas. During the past decade, his research interests have shifted to intelligent (knowledge-based) information systems and knowledge acquisition for large information systems. He developed techniques to cluster similar objects based on their attributes and represented this knowledge into Type Abstraction Hierarchies to provide guidance in approximate matching of similar objects. Using this methodology for relaxing query constraints, Dr. Chu led the development of CoBase, a cooperative database system for structured data, and KMed, a knowledge-based multi-media medical image system. CoBase has been successfully used in logistic applications to provide approximate matching of objects. Together with the medical school staff, the KMed project has been extended to the development of a Medical Digital Library, which consists of structured data, text documents, and images. The system provides approximate content-matching and navigation and serves as a cornerstone for future paperless hospitals. Currently, Dr. Chu is extending the relaxation methodology to XML for information exchange and approximate XML query answering in the web environment. Dr. Chu 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. He and his students have received best paper awards at the American Medical Information Association Congress in 2002 and 2003 for indexing and retrieval of medical free text, and have also been awarded a "Certificate of Merit" for the Medical Digital Library work at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in 2003.

Dr. Chu was the past ACM SIGCOMM chairman from 1973 to 1976, an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers for Computer Networking and Distributed Processing Systems (1978 to 1982) and he received a meritorious award for his service to IEEE. He was the workshop co-chair of the IEEE First International Workshop on Systems Management (1993) and received a Certificate of Appreciation award for his service. He served as technical program chairs for SIGCOMM (1975), VLDB (1986), Information Knowledge Sharing (2003), and ER (2004), and was the general conference chair of ER (1997). He has served as guest editor and associate editor for several journals related to intelligent information systems.