On December 7, 2021, Ion Stoica, Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, and leader of RISELab was appointed as the Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, School of Software. The appointment ceremony was held online, as well as in Room 10-316, Tsinghua East Main Building. was hosted by Professor Jinliang Li, Tsinghua International Affairs Officer, and Academician Jiaguang Sun, who is in charge of Tsinghua Big Data Research Centre.

In his opening remarks, Professor Jinliang Li said that Tsinghua is truly honored to invite Professor Stoica to conduct collaborative research and impart knowledge to Tsinghua students. Apart from his research work at the RISELab, Ion is also a co-founder of Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013), and a co-founder of Conviva Networks (2006). His foundational work in Big Data systems has great impact to both academia and industrial innovation.

Subsequently, Academician Jianguang Sun presented Professor Ion Stoica with the certificate of appointment as the Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University. He then welcomed Professor Stoica accepting the DVP appointment, and encouraged Tsinghua students stick to the school's culture of learning by doing, and learning software engineering skill by system building.

In his talk, Ion presented several projects under development at RISELab at UC Berkeley, including systems to better support machine learning (ML) workloads, and leveraging ML to build better systems. Ion first presented Ray, a general-purpose distributed system which provides both task-parallel and actor abstractions. Then, the key features of Balsa, a system that learns a database query optimizer from scratch, and NeuroCuts, a tool that generates decision trees for network packet classifiers were introduced.

Around 100 researchers and students all over the world attended the ceremony and the research seminar.

Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Director of RISELab (https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/). He is currently doing research on cloud computing and AI systems. Past work includes Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, Tachyon, Chord DHT, and Dynamic Packet State (DPS). He is an ACM Fellow, an honorary member of Romanian Academy, and has received numerous awards, including the Mark Weiser Award (2019), SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2015), and several "Test of Time" awards. He also co-founded three companies, Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013) and Conviva (2006).