University Professor Ming Li is the 2024 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award, a prestigious honour conferred for his pioneering and enduring contributions to modern information theory and bioinformatics.
Named after W. Wallace McDowell, director of engineering at IBM during the development of the landmark IBM 701 computer, the award has been conferred annually since 1966 by the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other innovative contributions.
“Congratulations to Ming on receiving the 2024 Wallace McDowell Award,” said Raouf Boutaba, Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “This recognition is richly deserved. Ming has not only been a pioneer in Kolmogorov complexity and in doing so has laid the foundation for a modern information theory, but he is also an innovator in computational biology by applying machine learning to develop personalized immunotherapies to treat cancer and infectious diseases.”
University
Professor
Ming
Li
is
known
internationally
for
his
fundamental
contributions
to
Kolmogorov
complexity,
bioinformatics,
machine
learning
theory,
and
analysis
of
algorithms.
His
many
awards
and
recognitions
include
the
Killam
Prize
in
2010
and
the
E.W.R.
Steacie
Memorial
Fellowship
in
1996.
He
was
named
a
Fellow
of
the
Royal
Society
of
Canada
in
2006,
Fellow
of
the
Association
for
Computing
Machinery
in
2006,
Fellow
of
the
Institute
of
Electrical
and
Electronics
Engineers
in
2006,
and
Fellow
of
the
International
Society
for
Computational
Biology
in
2021.
In
2021
he
received
the
Lifetime
Achievement
Award
in
Computer
Science
from
CS-Can
|
Info-Can.
University
Professor
Li’s
publications
have
been
cited
almost
40,000
times
with
an
h-index
of
70
as
of
January
2024
according
to
Google
Scholar.
About University Professor Ming Li
University Professor Li completed his PhD at Cornell University in 1985, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. In 1989 he joined the University of Waterloo as an Associate Professor in what was then the Department of Computer Science, and was promoted to Full Professor in 1994. He was named the Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics, a prestigious position he has held continuously since 2002. In 2009 he was named a University Professor, a title conferred to University of Waterloo faculty to recognize exceptional scholarly achievement and international pre-eminence.
Over his career, University Professor Li has made many pioneering and enduring contributions to modern information theory and bioinformatics, the highlights of which are described below.
Information
theory
With
his
colleagues
Charles
Bennett,
Peter
Gacs,
Paul
Vitányi
and
Tao
Jiang,
University
Professor
Li
systematically
developed
Kolmogorov
complexity,
a
central
theory
and
powerful
tool
in
information
science
that
deals
with
the
quantity
of
information
in
individual
objects.
In
a
paper
titled
“Information
Distance,”
presented
at
the
25th
Annual
ACM
Symposium
on
the
Theory
of
Computing
in
1993,
University
Professor
Li
together
with
Charles
Bennett,
Peter
Gacs,
Paul
Vitányi
and
Wojciech
Zurek
extended
Kolmogorov
complexity
to
measure
not
just
information
within
one
sequence,
but
also
information
between
two
sequences.
He
also
developed
the
incompressibility
method
to
solve
several
long-standing
open
problems
in
average-case
analysis
of
algorithms.
His textbook with Paul Vitányi, titled An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications, has helped educate a generation of researchers and practitioners about what information is, as well as provide a foundation for many research fields including deep learning and large language models. This widely read and celebrated computer science classic received a McGuffey Longevity Award in 2020.
Bioinformatics
University
Professor
Li
has
contributed
immensely
to
other
scientific
fields
most
notably
to
bioinformatics,
a
field
that
uses
computational
techniques
to
deduce
the
structure
and
function
of
DNA,
RNA,
protein
and
peptide
molecules.
University
Professor
Li’s
1994
paper
titled
Linear
approximation
of
shortest
superstrings,
with
Avrim
Blum,
Tao
Jiang,
John
Tromp
and
Mihalis
Yannakakis,
provided
the
fundamental
background
used
in
shotgun
DNA
sequencing
techniques
and
is
described
in
detail
in
well-known
computational
biology
books.
In 2016 University Professor Li and his team published in Nature Scientific Report the first complete protocol to sequence a monoclonal antibody protein. They have since improved their computational techniques and published results to sequence peptides, neoantigens and glycoproteins from mass spectrometry data for novel immunotherapies in a variety of top-tier journals, among them the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Methods, Nature Communications and Nature Machine Intelligence.
University Professor Li co-founded and served as an editor-in-chief for Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Through this journal and his innovations, he played a major role in reshaping the early heuristic bioinformatics into the current computer science–based computational biology. Furthermore, his elegant algorithms and ideas have led to commercially viable products that have made a tremendous impact on proteomics research and therapies. The bioinformatics software he and his students have developed have been commercialized successfully by Bioinformatics Solutions Inc., a Waterloo-based company he founded.