CSE Emeritus Professor Ming T. Liu Passed Away at 92

CSE Emeritus Professor Ming T. Liu Passed Away at 92

Professor Ming T. Liu of The Ohio State University was an internationally renowned scholar, a long-time leader in the IEEE Computer Society, and a deeply respected mentor who had advised 55 Ph.D. students over the course of his distinguished career.

Born and raised in south part of Taiwan in 1934, Professor Liu earned his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1957 from National Cheng Kung University in Tainan. After completing two years of military service, he came to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he received his M.S. degree in 1961 and his Ph.D. in 1964. He remained in the faculty at Penn for the following five years.

In 1969, Professor Liu joined Ohio State as a founding member of the Department of Computer and Information Science (later renamed Computer Science and Engineering) with the rank of associate professor. He was promoted to full professor in 1972. Over his decades at Ohio State, he supervised 55 Ph.D. dissertations, one of the highest totals in the university’s history, leaving a strong legacy through both his scholarship and his mentorship.

After four decades of dedicated teaching, research and service at Ohio State, Professor Liu retired in 2009 and was honored with the title of Emeritus Professor. In recognition of his unwavering commitment, scholarly contributions, and profound impact on the academic community, his students, colleagues, and friends established the Professor Ming T. Liu Student Scholarship for Excellence Endowment. Since its creation, this named scholarship has supported many undergraduate and graduate students in Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State, benefiting recipients annually.

Professor Liu made influential contributions in three major areas of computer science and engineering. In the early stage of his career, his research centered on computer and communication hardware. During the 1970s, he and his Ph.D. students published a series of seminal papers on the hardware design of ring networks at International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) and International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), two flagship conferences in the field. This line of work anticipated and influenced subsequent industrial developments, including IBM Token Ring in the 1980s and high-speed fiber-optic ring systems developed by AT&T in the 1990s, as well as other interconnection network technologies. His research during this period laid an important foundation for his later and more extensive contributions to distributed systems.

In 1979, Professor Liu founded the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), which has since become one of the premier conferences in distributed computing. He served as Chair of its Steering Committee from its inception until his retirement in 2012. Under his leadership, ICDCS rapidly grew in stature and scope, covering a broad spectrum of topics in distributed computing. Since its founding, the conference has had a profound and lasting impact on the computing community, with its published papers shaping the design and implementation of numerous distributed systems, software platforms, and applications used today.

In the 1980s, Professor Liu shifted his research focus to network protocols, addressing the specification, verification, implementation, and testing of computer-communication protocols. A representative contribution from this period is his 1987 paper at ACM SIGCOMM, which introduced a new methodology for designing reliable communication protocols. This methodology has since been incorporated into multiple networking textbooks and has influenced both research and practice in protocol engineering. In collaboration with Simon S. Lam of the University of Texas at Austin and Raymond A. Miller of the University of Maryland, College Park, Professor Liu co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) in 1993. He served as the General Chair of the inaugural ICNP conference, helping establish it as a leading venue for research in network protocols.

Building on his earlier work in hardware systems and network protocols, Professor Liu’s research naturally evolved into the broader field of distributed systems. Over the years, he made foundational contributions to several core areas, including fault tolerance, task scheduling, mutual exclusion, web caching, and power control in distributed systems, among others. His work helped shape theoretical understanding as well as practical system design in distributed computing.

Professor Liu published more than 190 papers in top journals and leading conferences. His scholarly achievements were widely recognized. He received a College of Engineering Research Award in 1982 and received the University Distinguished Scholar Award in 1991. Professor received the 1997 IEEE Computer Society Richard Merwin Distinguished Service Award. The IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing recognized him with the Distinguished Achievement Award in 2006. He was also honored with the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000 and the IEEE Special Presidential Award in 2007. In recognition of his sustained technical contributions and professional leadership, he was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 1983.

Professor Liu provided distinguished leadership across a wide range of IEEE Computer Society activities. He served as Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing from 1982 to 1984. From 1984 to 1985, he chaired the ACM/IEEE Eckert–Mauchly Award Committee, selecting the most prestigious annual award in computer architecture field. He was elected to the IEEE Computer Society Governing Board three times, serving from 1984 to 1990, and in 1986 he held the position of Vice President of the IEEE Computer Society. During the same period (1986–1990), he served multiple terms on the IEEE Fellow Evaluation Committee. He was also Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Computers from 1986 to 1990.

In addition to founding the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) and the IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Professor Liu devoted sustained and tireless effort to supporting two other major international conferences: the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) in its early time and the International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) from its beginning in 1970s until he retired in 2009. His long-standing service helped strengthen these venues and advance their global impact within the computing research community.

In the early 1980s, ACM and the IEEE Computer Society formed a joint committee to explore the establishment of an independent accreditation body for computing programs, modeled after the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). As a result of this effort, the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) was founded in 1984. In 2001, CSAC was integrated into ABET as the Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC).

Professor Liu played an active role in CSAC from the 1980s through the 1990s. He conducted numerous on-site visits to computer science departments to evaluate their academic programs and ensure they met accreditation standards. In recognition of his sustained and high-quality contributions to computing education through his work with CSAC, Professor Liu was honored as a Fellow of CSAC.