Hui Lei is a Director of Engineering at Meta. Previously, he was a Vice President at Futurewei Technologies. He has spent most of his professional career at IBM, where most recently he was Director and CTO of Watson Health Cloud, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and an IBM Master Inventor. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University. His technical interests span cloud computing, data engineering, and the Internet of things. He has published extensively on those topics and has produced over 90 patents. His vision and leadership have exerted a significant impact on many commercial software products and services, including those of the IBM Watson, IBM Cloud, IBM SmartCloud, and IBM WebSphere brands.
An active member of the IEEE Computer Society, Dr. Lei has served as Chair of the Transactions Operations Committee, a member of the Publications Board, a member of the Board of Governors, and Chair of the Technical Committee on Business Informatics and Systems. He was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing and a Steering Committee member of the IEEE Cloud Computing magazine. He co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E) and the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI). He has also participated as General Chair, Program Committee Chair, or a keynote speaker in many international conferences such as ICDCS, ICAC, MDM, and PerCom.
Dr. Lei is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core. He has been recognized with an IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for “pioneering contributions to scalable access to real-world data,” an IEEE Technical Committee on Cloud Computing Outstanding Leadership Award for “distinguished leadership and contributions in research innovation, product engineering, and community development for cloud computing,” and an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Service Award for “continual and outstanding service to the society’s mobile computing, cloud computing, and e-business communities.” In addition, he has received an IBM Corporate Award, the highest technical award of the company, for his leadership and breakthrough achievements leading to the Watson Platform for Health.
