Dr. Hong Zhang

Biography

Hong Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. He focuses on developing high-performance, scalable systems for big data and machine learning applications. His research centers on applying application-oriented design principles to create efficient big data machine learning systems. This approach emphasizes fully exploiting application-specific structures such as communication patterns, execution dependencies, and machine learning model structures to meet performance demands. Hong received the Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Systems Networking and completed his Ph.D. at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He worked with Professor Ion Stoica at UC Berkeley and was involved with the RISELab. His interests include large-scale data analytics, distributed machine learning training and serving systems, application network scheduling, data center networking, serverless computing, and cloud computing. Hong is currently looking for self-motivated PhD students to work with him on distributed systems, particularly in machine learning, starting in Spring/Fall 2025.

Research Interests