Bojie Li

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Computer Network & Protocol Laboratory

Huawei’s Computer Network & Protocol Laboratory is a subsidiary of the Distributed and Parallel Software Laboratory of the Central Software Institute of the 2012 Laboratory, with locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Vision: Rooted in laying the foundation stone, innovation leads the future of distributed communication

Positioning: Huawei’s software engine in the field of computer network and protocol technology, covering theoretical breakthroughs, technological inventions, technological innovations, and quality delivery. Standing at the forefront of this technical field, we research and break through world-class technical problems in computing native networks and wide-area network deterministic communication, build an industry-leading full stack of distributed communication, and work with ICT, terminal, cloud, intelligent car and other main product teams to build differentiated communication competitiveness, gradually grow the industrial ecosystem, and help business success.

Team: A high-level innovation team composed of top industry-leading experts, genius youngsters, PhDs, and engineers mixed special forces, overseas legions. The technical research results are significant. Since 2018, 5 papers have been accepted by SIGCOMM, the top global network communication conference; and key technologies have been selected into Huawei’s top 10 inventions for three consecutive sessions.

Let’s update and preview the cities I have (or will) visit here!

(July 22, 2022) Due to the pandemic, I haven’t moved for the past 4 months, missing a wedding on May 1st and another on May 20th. We haven’t seen each other for 4 months.

Now, everywhere requires a travel history of the past 14 days, but I can provide my travel history for the past 10 years! Similar to the logic of the travel history card, short-term stops are not counted, but transfers are generally included. As of December 13, 2022, the travel history card has been phased out.

From 2012 to July 2022, I have visited a total of 42 cities and traveled 259 times (traveling from city A to city B counts as one trip, and returning to city A counts as two trips). In 2019 alone, I traveled 63 times. I was quite shocked when I got this statistic. Although I traveled a lot for business in the past three years and visited 12 cities in Japan in 2019, I didn’t expect it to be this many. Why so many business trips? My first major project was in Hangzhou, so I spent most of my time there from June 2019 to May 2020. Currently, I lead three teams in Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Israel, but not in Beijing. Additionally, as an architect, I often need to attend seminars. It seems like God thinks I’m suited for long-distance relationships.

During my Ph.D. joint training at USTC and Microsoft Research Asia (internship in senior year 2013 ~ Ph.D. graduation in 2019), I frequently traveled between Hefei and Beijing, which was already quite a lot for a student. Unexpectedly, the number of business trips increased after starting work, with my travel frequency surpassing 97% of users on Flight Manager in 2021. The remaining 3% must be frequent flyers. I regret being too frugal during my Ph.D., often reluctant to spend money on tickets, resulting in long separations from my girlfriend. Another regret is that I often felt too lazy to write summaries after trips. My memory isn’t great, so after a long time, I can only rely on photos and chat records to recall.

As of November 2023, I have visited 71 cities and traveled 380 times, an increase of 29 cities compared to a year ago, mainly from our honeymoon trip to Xinjiang after the wedding and my three-month trip to the United States. The term “city” is somewhat difficult to define. In the U.S., it might be more reasonable to correspond to counties. If I record all trips across counties, the number of “trips” in the U.S. would increase significantly (traveling within the Bay Area and between Los Angeles and Irvine shouldn’t be considered trips), and I might not remember them all.

Of course, I don’t have the authority to obtain base station connection data from telecom operators. Travel data is collected from booking records, business trip records, etc. Some tickets were not booked by me, so some trips might be missing. For example, the time of returning to Hefei for undergraduate graduation after finishing my internship at MSRA in June 2014 is untraceable. According to the internship certificate from July 9, 2013, to May 30, 2014, the Beijing to Hefei date has been confirmed.

If you find any errors, please contact me for corrections.

My Footprints

2024

This article summarizes the technical architecture of USTC iCourse.club. Founded in 2015, iCourse is a Flask-based website aiming at rating courses in USTC (University of Science and Technology of China). Although it is only a small website from a technical point of view, it offers a glimpse of the architecture of a typical web service.

USTC LUG GitLab will soon stop serving non-campus users. Although I have a campus email, to prevent sudden disconnection one day, I have backed up all my repositories locally and hung the public repositories on GitHub. As the first user of LUG GitLab, I have a total of 209 repositories, 123 of which are personal repositories. LUG GitLab was established on March 14, 2013 (Pi Day) and has been running for 9 years, even slightly earlier than Telegram. GitLab and VPN are the longest-running (9 years) network services I have established, serving thousands of users. I have long left the management and operation team, but I still have a lot of feelings for these services.

My GitHub homepage: https://github.com/bojieli

My USTC LUG GitLab homepage: https://git.lug.ustc.edu.cn/boj

These public repositories are mainly the course assignments I did at USTC, various undergraduate projects, and network services I did at LUG. Most of the projects I did during my PhD at MSRA have not been open-sourced. I only released the source code of SocksDirect and the LaTeX source code of several papers, some of which have been anonymized and do not retain internal commit information. The source code after work is even less likely to be made public at will. The already open-sourced MindSpore AKG project also anonymized the internal commit information when it was open-sourced (internal contributors after open-sourcing are directly developing on the public repo, but I have left the AKG project after open-sourcing).

Therefore, from the contributions on GitHub, you can see that the most contributions were in 2016, with 2000+ contributions; last year and the year before, there were only a pitiful number of contributions; there were 1000+ contributions from 2013-2015; only a few hundred from 2017-2019, one reason is that the project was not open-sourced, and the other is that I personally was somewhat detached from the front line of coding, pondering new research ideas all day, becoming a PPT engineer, and not spending much time on actually coding to implement ideas, which is also why I published fewer papers in the later stages of my PhD.

“Where did that gazelle go?” Mom suddenly asked me.

The gazelle Mom was talking about was a craft made of black hardwood. It was a gift from my dad when he returned from Africa. It had always been on the corner of my desk. At this moment, my heart started to pound, because I had given it to my good friend Wanfang yesterday.

As one of the founders of the USTC Course Evaluation Community, I am willing to promote the 2021 effort of several collaborators on my personal homepage: PI Review (https://pi-review.com/).

It has been 7 years since the establishment of the Course Evaluation Community in 2015. The community now has over 16,000 reviews and has a significant influence among USTC students. Many students refer to the reviews on the community when selecting courses. Anyone who has pursued a PhD or Master’s degree would likely agree that a mentor is crucial to a student’s life and future during these years. Although there are already many websites for evaluating mentors, such as Mentor Recommendation, Rate My Supervisor, and Research Control, they all have many issues. Here is a more detailed evaluation. The founders of PI Review discovered that there was no satisfactory website, so they established PI Review in 2021 and have added many new features this year.

PI Review operates on an anonymous basis. You only need to verify with your school email to post reviews, but the email verification is solely to prevent spam. Email addresses will never be made public, and we will not send spam emails. All posted reviews are anonymous. We welcome everyone to share their own or their friends’ mentors. If you think a mentor is good, you can help yourself by bringing collaborators on board. If you think a mentor is not good, you can help junior students avoid pitfalls.

PI Review currently suggests evaluating mentors across 5 dimensions, including Advisor Style & Mentorship (hands-on or hands-off, etc.), Expectations (publishing papers, work hours, etc.), Funding & Support (salary, internships, etc.), Research, and Lab Culture. Of course, this is just a reference, and you can evaluate mentors according to your own dimensions.

During my own PhD period, both of my Microsoft co-supervised mentors were very good to me, providing a lot of guidance and help. I have also written reviews on PI Review. If you are interested, you can look them up. The search function for mentors should be quite useful.

During the dance performance, the first half of “Flowers and Moon in Pairs” got stuck for the first time, restarted, and then got stuck twice again… becoming the program that brought the most joy to the audience :)

Short video (223 MB, 2:23)

If the playback is stuttering, you can move to Bilibili link

(This article is reprinted from CNSys Official Account, welcome to follow the official public account CNSys of ACM ChinaSys)

The ACM ChinaSys Colloquium held its first online academic lecture on April 29, 2022, with the theme of “System Research in the Industry” for academic discussion and exchange. Dr. Li Feifei, Vice President of Alibaba and Head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Database Product Division, and Dr. Tan Kun, Director of the Distributed and Parallel Software Laboratory of Huawei Central Software Institute, were invited as special guests to give academic reports and participate in online interviews. The academic lecture was hosted by Dr. Li Cheng, a special researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China, Dr. Li Bojie and Dr. Yao Ting from Huawei. The conference was conducted through Tencent online meeting room and Bilibili live broadcast, attracting more than 600 viewers.

(Long text warning: this article is about 17000 words long)

Recently, several friends came to me to talk about their choices. “A person’s destiny, of course, depends on self-struggle, but also needs to consider the course of history.” My father has always told me that choice is greater than effort. I have lived a third of my life and have made many choices: choosing computer competitions in junior high school, choosing both math and computer competitions in high school, choosing USTC for college entrance examination, regretting not getting into Tsinghua, switching from a math major to computer science in my sophomore year, giving up entrepreneurship, work and going abroad to choose MSRA in my senior year, choosing to go to a big company after getting my PhD, interviewing 12 companies and finally choosing to work at Huawei…

I have always had difficulty making choices, especially being easily entangled by sunk costs, and often struggling for a long time for things I can’t get. This leads me to prefer stability over risk when making choices. At the same time, I am quite idealistic, hoping to use my technology to change our lives. Looking back at these choices, I feel like Truman in “The Truman Show”, living in a huge studio, although these choices seem to be made by my own free will, they are the natural conclusions of the environment and personality preferences at the time; many times I have done some unconventional things, but I have been pulled back to the established track by an invisible big hand. This is probably the course of history.