As a research staff member at IBM, Dr. Zhang has made significant
original contributions to Services Computing Innovations and
Interactive Media Systems. His HyperChain Framework enables syndication
and coordination of various resources in a systematic and extensible
way. His Media HyperChain has been successfully deployed in interactive
video systems. His Services HyperChain enables the collaboration and
integration between software modules with Web services interfaces. Dr.
Zhang’s pioneering research and development results have been
patented, commercialized, and widely published. <br>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">1. Media HyperChain
</span><br>
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As the lead architect of IBM HotVideo technology, in 1996 Dr. Zhang
created an innovative system of hypervideo extending the concept of
hyperlinks from text and images to any dynamic object within a video.
He created Media HyperChain to support the integration and syndication
of audio, video, data, and Web content in a coordinated fashion. A
resulting product, HotVideo, was widely reported by PC Magazine, CIO
Magazine, and USA Today. As the lead inventor of a patent granted in 17
countries/regions, Dr. Zhang and his team created a non-intrusive
hyperlink indicating mechanism, an adaptive key-frame tracking, and a
content-ware authoring algorithm for HotVideo. These are the
fundamental technologies in IBM’s product, HotMedia, which
has been extensively used as the interactive multimedia feature in IBM
WebSphere products and on customer Web sites. Extending HotVideo
technology to the interactive TV domain, Dr. Zhang invented digital TV
commerce enablement and program tracking solutions in 1999 to enable
digital TV operators to orchestrate e-commerce opportunities in their
live or recorded broadcasting programs. Dr. Zhang published a paper on
this breakthrough technology in ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems. Dr.
Zhang was presented an IBM "Outstanding Technical Achievement Award"
for HotMedia Architecture. HotMedia was awarded the CNET/PC Expo's
"Best of Show Software Award" in 2000. <br>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">2. Services HyperChain
</span><br>
<br>
As one of the well-known explorers and pioneers of Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA) and Web Services innovations, Dr. Zhang extended his
HyperChain Framework to enable the flexibility, extensibility, and
configurability of software modules to build the foundation for the
emerging SOA and Web Services-based Services Computing discipline. In
his Services HyperChain system, Dr. Zhang created a uniform business
service description model and a configurable business protocol-enabling
framework for on-demand business collaboration. Dr. Zhang invented the
first federated Web services discovery technology, Business Explorer
for Web Services (BE4WS) in 2001 and the first requirements driven and
services-oriented business process composition technology, Web Services
Outsourcing Manager (WSOM), in 2002. Both BE4WS and WSOM have been
released as commercial tools by IBM alphaWorks, IBM’s website
showcasing pioneering technologies, and were reported by InfoWorld and
CoverPages. His Web Services composition patent (WSOM) has become a
technology foundation for business services composition in the
industry. Dr. Zhang published his novel Web services discovery
framework with adaptive query generation and result aggregation
algorithm and a “0-1”service-selection model with
global composition algorithm implemented in WSOM. He also published a
book that introduces the next-generation of e-business technologies
based on Web Services and SOA.
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Dr. Zhang has been playing a central role in IBM driving the direction
of Services Computing technology. He is the founding chair of IBM
Research’s Services Computing discipline and is leading
worldwide SOA Services research. He has been co-leading IBM’s
corporate wide SOA Solution Stack project since 2004, building
next-generation SOA. In 2005, he launched IBM’s
“SOA Innovations” blog. In 2006, Dr. Zhang received
an “IBM Pathfinder Award” for his work on the
development of SOA Solution Stacks advancing the use of SOA in IBM and
IBM’s leadership in the marketplace. <br>
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His new book “Services Computing” has been
published by Springer. Dr. Zhang has been invited to lead the IEEE
Standards Association SOA and Web Services Working Group and is a
member of the ISO JTC1 Web Services Study Group. Dr. Zhang successfully
led the initiative to create the IEEE Transactions on Services
Computing, which will be launched in 2008. <br>
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Lastly, Dr. Zhang has 35 granted patents and 18 pending patent
applications. He has received 8 IBM Creative Contribution Awards, an
Outstanding Achievement Award by the World Academy of Sciences, and an
Innovation Leadership Award. Dr. Zhang has also published his best
practices about Services Computing and interactive media in 3 books, 37
journal papers, 6 on-line articles, 4 book chapters, and 55 conference
papers.