iQua Research Group

Baochun (李葆春 in Chinese) is the only member in the team who does not come and go (that must be the streaming server in peer-to-peer networks). Here is what Baochun has to say to introduce himself.

I am currently a Full Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. I am the holder of the Bell University Laboratories Endowed Chair in Computer Engineering since August 2005. I have been the director of the iQua research group since 2000, as well as the designer and maintainer of this web site.

My research interests have been in the area of peer-to-peer and wireless networks, with a focus on the quality and performance of services in large-scale distributed systems. I enjoy the process of bridging the gap between theory and practice, and to bring theoretical results to practical implementations. In the past several years, I have worked on the application of control theory, game theory, microeconomics, optimization theory, as well as network coding to address more practical research challenges. I also love writing actual code, building real systems from scratch, and making them work efficiently.

In 2000, I was the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Award in the Field of Communications Systems, for my paper published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. The work represented one of the earliest research results in the area of application-layer Quality of Service adaptations using a control-theoretic model, and its real-world middleware implementation in a distributed visual tracking system. In 2005, with Ying Zhu (now Assistant Professor at University of Ontario Institute of Technology), I have received the Best Student Paper Award in the Thirteenth International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS 2005), for my research on modeling application-layer overlay networks with linear capacity constraints.

I received my B.Engr. degree in 1995 from Tsinghua University, China, and my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1997 and 2000 from the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am currently a member of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE.

I am married with two lovely children. When I am not in front of a computer, I enjoy challenging my daughters with interesting problems (or, soon, be challenged), and reading books on economics. On the more active side, I enjoy wandering around the streets in Beijing, riding my Gary Fisher hybrid to commute to work in Toronto with 18.71 kilometres one-way, and running with my iPod nano and the Nike+iPod kit, anywhere in the world. I have just started (as of summer 2007) to learn playing the piano as an adult beginner.

For more information about my research and professional services, just revisit this web site from time to time. I also maintain a stack of static web pages, which I still enjoy, due to its simplicity and elegance. In particular, you could take a look at the professional services that have kept me busy; and if you are really serious, my CV as well.

Baochun’s photograph in high resolution, as of March 2008.