Ke (David) is a research scientist in the Core Systems team at Facebook. His current work focuses on building resilient distributed systems that power Facebook’s geo-replicated infrastructure.
He earned his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering (advisor Prof. Z. Morley Mao) from University of Michigan.
His thesis focuses on validating reliability and performance properties of mobile systems and emerging autonomous vehicle platforms using systematic software engineering techniques, including runtime profiling, program analysis and formal methods.
He received an MPhil (Master of Philosophy) and bachelor degree (first-class honour) in Computer Science and Engineering from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
His prior research also includes performance diagnosis and acceleration of Android systems, traffic engineering in software-defined networks, network and compute acceleration of cloud data centers.
Education
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering
2014 - 2019 EECS Department, CSE Division
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
MPhil in Computer Science and Engineering
2011 - 2013 Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
BEng in Computer Science, Computer Engineering (first class honours)
2007 - 2011 Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Research Work
Safeguarding autonomous vehicle (AV) software platforms:
1) Developed automated program analysis and instrumentation infrastructure to verify and enforce safety policy compliance in AV software (e.g., Baidu Apollor, Autoware). [SIGMETRICS 2021 paper]
2) Developed customized program analysis and instrumentation infrastructure for AV software platforms (e.g., Baidu Apollo, Autoware) to discover security vulnerability and enforce policy-based permission control to mitigate cyberattacks against AV systems. [EuroS&P 2020 paper][Homepage][2019 MTRAC award]
Protocol customization: Program analysis and transformation to localize and disable optional vulnerable features in network and system protocol implementation for attack surface reduction. [FEAST 2017 paper]
Mobile performance diagnosis: Lightweight trace collection on mobile platforms and systematic, automated machine learning based characterization approach to facilitate root cause diagnosis of performance issues with mobile apps. [Internet-QoE 2016 paper][Media coverage], [MOBILESoft 2019 paper]
Hybrid SDN: Incremental deployment of SDN in enterprise and ISP network systems for centralized traffic engineering. [SOSR 2016 paper][Patent]
Mobile performance acceleration: Accelerating mobile applications through flip-flop replication. [MobiSys 2015 paper][Homepage]
CASN: A cluster-area sensor network for cluster management and security enhancement in data centers. [MASS 2013 paper]
WSTCP: Wirelessly Assisted TCP for High-Bandwidth Data Center Networks. [MPhil Thesis]
VOLUME (Virtual On-Line Unified Memory Environment): A distributed virtual memory that unifies the physical memory and disk resources on many compute nodes and form a system-wide data substrate to support large-scale in-memory computation. [CloudCom'13 paper]
Layer Zero (L0): A general-purpose substrate for cloud computing. [Zhiqiang's PhD Thesis]
Ashkan Nikravesh, David Ke Hong, Qi Alfred Chen, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Z. Morley Mao. QoE Inference Without Application Control.
In Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on QoE-based Analysis and Management of Data Communication Networks (Internet-QoE). Aug. 26, 2016. Florianópolis, Brazil. Media coverage in The Conversation.
Mark Gordon, David Ke Hong, Peter Chen, Jason Flinn, Scott Mahlke, Z. Morley Mao. Accelerating Mobile Applications through Flip-Flop Replication (Best Paper Award).
In Proc. of the 13th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2015). May 18-22, 2015. Florence, Italy. Best paper award.
First Class Honors Degree for Bachelor of engineering, 2011
University Scholarship, 2007 - 2011
Talks and Demos
AVGuardian: Detecting and Mitigating Publish-Subscribe Overprivilege for Autonomous Vehicle Systems. Presentation at the 5th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P 2020). Sep. 10, 2020. Virtual event. [Talk]
PerfProbe: A Systematic, Cross-Layer Performance Diagnosis Framework for Mobile Platforms. Presentation at the 2019 IEEE/ACM 6th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft 2019). May 25, 2019. Montréal, Canada. [Slides]
Performance, Security, and Safety Requirements Testing for Smart Systems Through Systematic Software Analysis. PhD thesis defense at UMich. May 15, 2019. Ann Arbor, MI. [Slides]
An Initial Investigation of Protocol Customization. Presentation at the ACM CCS Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation (FEAST 2017). Nov. 3, 2017. Dallas, TX. [Slides]
A Synergy of Wireless Sensor Networks and Data Center Systems. MPhil thesis defense at HKUST. Dec. 17, 2013. Hong Kong, China. [Abstract] [Slides]
A Synergy of the Wireless Sensor Network and the Data Center System. Presentation at the 10th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS 2013). Oct. 14-16, 2013. Hangzhou, China. [Slides]
Layer Zero: An Efficient Platform for Cloud Computing. Demo at China Hi-Tech Fair 2012 (CHTF 2012). Nov. 16-21, 2012. Shenzhen, China. [Poster (in Chinese)]
Research Fellow, EECS Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 06/2019 - 06/2020 - Researched on program analysis and formal verification to validate security & safety of autonomous vehicle software - Led commercialization of the developed technologies supported by MTRAC award - Published reserch papers to IEEE EuroS&P 2020 and ACM SIGMETRICS 2021
Strategic CAD Labs Research Intern, Intel Corporation, Folsom, CA 05/2016 - 09/2016 - Developed an app and OS-layer runtime profiling and statistical characterization prototype to diagnose performance problems with Android apps and applied it to guide the performance problem analysis and fixing in popular Android apps - Published the work at the 6th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft 2019)
HP Labs Networking Research Associate, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Palo Alto, CA, 06/2015 - 10/2015 - Designed a hybrid software-defined networking architecture for enterprise and ISP network systems - Published the work at the 2nd ACM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR 2016)
Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST, 02/2013 - 05/2013 - Designed and implemented a secondary index for an exascale key-value storage system KV+ - Developed tutorials for Layer Zero and a web interface for KV+
Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST, 09/2011 - 05/2013 - Conducted tutorials and labs of various courses for CSE majors - Instructed linear algebra for freshmen in CSE department
Junior Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST, 07/2011 - 08/2011 - Administrated a Xen-based research cluster - Developed software VRS – a Xen-based virtual machine reservation system
