Li Gong (computer scientist)

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Gong (宫).

Gong Li (simplified Chinese: 宫力; traditional Chinese: 宮力; pinyin: Gōng Lì), also known in English as Li Gong, is the chairman and CEO of Acadine Technologies, a systems software company specializing in mobile operating systems for mobile, wearable, and IoT devices. Acadine’s core product H5OS is a web-centric operating system that is primarily based on the open web standard HTML5. It is derived from Firefox OS, whose development Li had overseen as president of Mozilla Corporation.

Education

Born and raised in Beijing, Gong obtained B.S./M.S. at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, all in computer science.

Academic Achievements

Li Gong has 18 issued US patents and co-authored 3 books (published by Addison Wesley and O’Reilly), many technical articles, and 5 general articles in the magazine Nature. He won the Best Paper Award at the 1989 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and received the 1994 Leonard G. Abraham Prize given by the IEEE Communications Society for "the most significant contribution to technical literature in the field of interest of the IEEE."

Career

Li Gong started his career as a researcher, primarily in the fields of computer systems, networking, and information security. He served as both Program Chair and General Conference Chair for ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, and IEEE CSFW. He was Associate Editor of ACM TISSEC and Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Internet Computing. Before going into industry he first worked at Odyssey Research in Ithaca, New York, and later at the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. He held visiting positions at Cornell and Stanford, and was a Guest Chair Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing.

In 1996, he joined the JavaSoft division at Sun Microsystems (in Cupertino, California) as Chief Java Security Architect and designed the security architecture of the Java platform. He became a Distinguished Engineer and later headed engineering for Java Embedded Server and JXTA, and was the founding Chair of the Java Expert Group at the international standard organization OSGi and led the OSGi 1.0 specification.

He relocated back to Beijing in 2001 to found the Sun Microsystems Engineering and Research Institute (ERI) in China, where he served as General Manager and grew it from scratch to over 400 engineers.

In 2005, he joined Microsoft as general manager to lead MSN in China and served as vice president of the Microsoft China R&D Group. His team worked in many areas across all the services MSN offered — including Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, Safety, Mobile, Search, Ads platform, and Virtual Earth.

In 2007, Gong joined Mozilla Corporation to found its China subsidiary Mozilla Online Ltd where he served as chairman and CEO. Four years later, he founded Mozilla Taiwan and served as CEO. Later, he served in a number of executive roles at Mozilla’s headquarters, including senior vice president of mobile devices, president of Asia operations, chief operating officer, and president, where he was the strategy, business, and technology owner for the Firefox OS project (among other things).

He left Mozilla at the end of April, 2015, and started Acadine Technologies, initially under the name "Gone Fishing". It was announced on July 15, 2015 that Acadine Technologies received $100M of first-round funding from Tsinghua Unigroup International, a Hong Kong entity controlled by Tsinghua University and the Chinese government. In the same year, Li Gong stated that the company was already seeking a second round of funding from international investors, a main rationale being "to dispel very early the incorrect perception that we are somehow a China-backed company. We are really a pure Silicon Valley-style startup".

In his career, Li participated (as co-founder, investor and advisor) in a number of startups in the Silicon Valley and in China. He was venture partner and head of the China office for the US venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners from 2007 to 2009.

Awards

Li was named one of the 2003 China New Economy People by China Internet Weekly and Sina.com, and received the China Open Source Movement Leadership Award in 2003 given by the China Software Industry Association. In 2013 he was named a "China Outstanding Open Source Contributor" by the China Open Source Software Promotion Union, and one of the top 100 managers in China by the Chinese management magazine Manager Today.

He was the founding Beijing chapter chair of TEEC (Tsinghua Entrepreneur and Executive Club) until 2007, and is a long-serving member on the board of directors of the Tsinghua University Alumni Association.

External links

• Acadine Official Website

• http://www.demos.co.uk/files/China_Final.pdf