The Connector: New School of Computing director brings deep experience with sensors, networking

When Kuang-Ching “KC” Wang started as an assistant professor at Clemson University, he asked a mentor how to succeed in the field of computer networking.

“If you stop thinking about networking as connecting computers, you will start to find the right track,” the long- time professor told him. “Networking is about connecting people and connecting things that people care about. Find your people, then find the things you can connect to make them better.”

Decades later, the advice still rings true, and it’s served as Wang’s guiding principle throughout his research career, which includes transformative applications in artificial intelligence, healthcare, cyber-physical systems, and cybersecurity.

Wang — who joined Watson College last fall as a Professor of Empire Innovation and the director of the School of Computing — comes to Binghamton University with an impressive résumé of accomplishments. At Clemson, he held various leadership roles and directed more than $100 million in sponsored research, including leading multi-university teams on landmark National Science Foundation initiatives such as FABRIC (a U.S.-wide testbed for the next generation of the internet) and CloudLab (a similar effort focused on cloud computing).

An eclectic education

A native of Taiwan, Wang earned his bachelor’s and master's degrees in electrical engineering at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. While there, he learned about building systems to help people with spinal cord injuries, using neural networks to mimic the brain impulses that would exercise muscles in paralyzed limbs.

“That two-year project was my first attempt to connect my engineering knowledge to a real-world problem,” he says. “Healthcare has been my passion from early on.”

Because he spent a few years in the U.S. as a child, Wang set his sights on returning for his doctorate and landed at the University of Wisconsin — Madison in the late 1990s. He pivoted from his original plan to study biomedical engineering when a professor he hoped to work with decided to retire. Instead, he joined a different professor who needed students for a project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The goal was to build the world's first large- scale sensor network — something that is an everyday part of our lives today but was a groundbreaking idea at the time. The U.S. Army wanted a battlefield-monitoring system that could give real-time positions for tanks, helicopters, troop carriers, and other vehicles.

The UW-Madison team included five faculty members from different disciplines, with

more than 10 other universities and a dozen companies as partners. Wang became the first student on the project and de facto leader for 10 other graduate students with skills ranging from radio transmission to networking and data processing.

“It was super exciting,” he says. “Every three months, we did a check-in with DARPA. We went to the California desert for live demonstrations of different parts of the system for generals

and other Pentagon officials. In the third year, we brought the whole solution out for a final test — and everything worked! That research became the basis for my PhD dissertation.”

Making connections

When he arrived at Clemson, Wang found he was the only researcher with experience in networking with applications, and he soon got involved in many projects across the university. Because BMW has a major manufacturing plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, he worked for a while on intelligent highway systems, with his students trying to figure out if a Wi-Fi signal held steady while strapped into cars going 140 mph around a racetrack.

As the internet rapidly expanded to accommodate Google, YouTube, and social media, the insatiable demands for bandwidth had some leading researchers worried that the whole system could crash. The NSF developed the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI, pronounced “genie”) to test possible solutions on a smaller, interconnected group of university campuses.

“NSF leaders foresaw how the Internet of Things and cell phones would emerge as big drivers of online traffic, but they needed some- one who understood how to bridge the gap between core networking research areas and wireless applications,” Wang says. “My research sits right at that intersection.”

He convinced Clemson to be an early adopter for GENI and pursued many projects using it, so when the next generation of networking needed to be developed a decade later, he was in the room — specifically, a sandwich shop in Washington, D.C. — when he and a few colleagues sketched out an even more ambitious plan on a napkin.

“We brainstormed some bullet points, and we started to see the shape of it,” he says. “The new network should connect a wide swath of critical research areas that the NSF supports, which means high-performance computing, distributed networking security, cybersecurity, AI, and so much more.”

They did some old-school networking — which included lots of phone calls — to break down silos among computer science disciplines and to recruit more collaborators. Those back-of-a-napkin ideas evolved into NSF FABRIC, a $20 million federal project that connects 29 sites around the U.S., with additional sites in Europe, Asia, and South America for experimentation in forward-thinking topics like cybersecurity, distributed computing, storage, virtual reality, 5G, and machine learning, as well as other science applications. Meanwhile, Wang leads a similar effort, CloudLab, that connects almost 1,000 machines across the U.S.

The key to success, he says, is understanding what people need instead of insisting on one-size-fits-all solutions: “It's really fun to build systems, but you don't keep building them for the same problems. You use the same concepts, perhaps the same techniques, but try to solve different problems.”

Looking ahead

When Watson College sought a new director for the School of Computing last year, Dean Atul Kelkar called Wang — a former colleague at Clemson — and encouraged him to apply.

“Having witnessed firsthand KC’s depth of experience, scholarly excellence, and distinguished record as a researcher during our time together at Clemson, I knew his addition to Watson would be transformative,” Kelkar says. “His leadership will be instrumental in elevating the School of Computing and positioning Watson at the forefront of trustworthy AI and its real-world applications. We look forward with great excitement to the remarkable accomplishments the School of Computing will achieve under his direction.”

After 21 years in South Carolina, Wang took the leap and moved north. He’s excited about the possibilities that Binghamton offers, especially the newly established New York Center for AI Responsibility and Research. He will also return to his roots in healthcare with research funding from the National Institutes of Health focused on a better understanding of muscle pain — how it happens and whether doctors can predict the healing process, like X-rays do for bones.

“I feel this is an amazing time when Binghamton — especially the School of Computing — is ready to launch,” he says. “When they were looking for a director for the school, they made it clear they didn’t want a typical director. They wanted someone who is in the trenches working on big research projects, and someone who understands how we build teams to bring faculty together. That's what we need here at Binghamton.”