Dr. Kwang-Hae (Kane) Kim is Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He received a B.S degree in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University in 1969, an M.A. degree from the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1972 and a Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley, in December 1974. During 1969 – 1971, he served as an ROTC officer in the Korean Army. Prior to joining UCI to lead the establishment of the Computer Engineering Program, he taught at USC, SUNY Binghamton, NY, and USF.
Dr. Kim was elected IEEE Fellow in 1988 for his contributions to the field of fault-tolerant distributed computing. In 1998 He also received the 2003 Microsoft Windows Embedded Academic Excellence Award.
Dr. Kim is the primary developer of the Time-triggered Message-triggered Object (TMO) methodology for high-level real-time programming and system engineering (http://dream.eng.uci.edu/TMO/TMO.htm). The methodology, facilitated by tools such as middleware (TMOSM & ROAFTS), is aimed at inducing a major improvement in the productivity of programmers and in the reliability of real-time application software. Introduction of TMO in 1992 was a bold step toward drastically uplifting the level of abstractions which real-time distributed computing programmers can work with. The programming model, methodology, and tool models which have been further solidified since then under Dr. Kim’s leadership through collaborative efforts involving researchers in Vienna University of Technology, Hitachi, Ltd., Konkuk University, etc., have been found to be effective in both classrooms and practicing fields. The recognition of the TMO technology as one of the major new-generation ubiquitous computing application enablers has also been growing in recent years.
In addition, Dr. Kim originated the DRB technique and other widely applicable basic approaches for cost-effective design of ultra-reliable fault-tolerant, real-time, distributed and parallel computer systems. These enable construction of systems capable of time-bounded recovery from hardware and software faults without missing the deadlines for processing important data and delivering outputs to controlled environments. The two fundamental approaches for replicating distributed computing modules to facilitate real-time fault tolerance are the majority-vote-based triple (or multiple) modular redundancy (TMR) approach and the approach of primary-shadow pairing of self-checking processing nodes (PSP). Dr. Kim made a pioneering contribution to building the solid scientific foundation for the PSP approach. The DRB scheme and its extension to fit with distributed computing objects, the PSTR scheme, are about the most powerful and efficient instances of the PSP approach. Other widely applicable basic techniques created by Dr. Kim include a real-time network surveillance and reconfiguration scheme for point-to-point networks (SNS scheme) and another for bus networks (PRHB/MD scheme).
Dr. Kim served as chair of the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Distributed Processing, and hosted several IEEE conferences. He was the main initiator of the IEEE Computer Society’s International Symposium on Object-oriented Real-time distributed Computing series (http://dream.eng.uci.edu/ISORCs.htm) and also served as a founding member of the editorial board for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel & Distributed Systems.
