PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Henry Hong Xu

Also known as Hong Xu

Henry Hong Xu is a computer scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) whose research covers machine learning systems and data center networks. He earned a B.Eng. at CUHK in 2007 and a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 2013, then worked at City University of Hong Kong from 2013 to 2020. His coauthored NAssim paper won the ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Award in 2022, and he coauthored Lina, which speeds up mixture-of-experts models, at USENIX ATC in 2023 and Mycroft, a tracing system for LLM training, at SOSP in 2025. A paper from his NetX Lab on SONiC DASH SmartSwitch received the NSDI Community Award in 2026. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at CUHK.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2007–2013

    Degrees at CUHK and Toronto

    He earns a B.Eng. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2007, then an M.A.Sc. in 2009 and a Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of Toronto.

  2. 2013–2020

    Years at City University of Hong Kong

    From 2013 to 2020 he is with City University of Hong Kong. In 2014 he receives an Early Career Scheme Grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, and in 2015 his work wins an IEEE ICNP best paper award.

  3. 2022

    A SIGCOMM best paper

    In 2022, he is a coauthor of NAssim, a software-defined network assimilation system that wins the ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Award. NAssim parses device manuals into configuration models, validates them, and applies a deep-learning-based mapping algorithm that matches them to the model in the SDN controller.

  4. 2023

    Lina for mixture-of-experts models

    In 2023, he coauthors Lina at USENIX ATC with Jiamin Li, Yimin Jiang, Yibo Zhu and Cong Wang. Lina speeds up distributed mixture-of-experts training and inference, cutting training step time by up to 1.73x and 95th-percentile inference time by an average of 1.63x, and ByteDance adopts it for training BERT-based MoE models.

  5. 2023

    An ICNP best paper award

    In October 2023, “Enabling Load Balancing for Lossless Datacenters”, a paper he coauthors, receives the IEEE ICNP 2023 Best Paper Award.

  6. 2025

    Mycroft for LLM training

    He coauthors Mycroft with Minlan Yu and others, published at SOSP in October 2025. Mycroft is a tracing and root cause analysis system for collective communication in LLM training; deployed at ByteDance, it detects anomalies within 15 seconds in 90% of cases.

  7. 2026

    NSDI Community Award

    In 2026, the paper “Offloading Cloud Network Services at Production Scale with SONiC DASH SmartSwitch”, led by Shaofeng Wu, a final-year Ph.D. student in his NetX Lab, receives the NSDI Community Award as one of four papers selected. The system is deployed in Microsoft Azure and reaches 1.53 Tbps throughput and 256 million concurrent connections.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate Professor at CUHK

    He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at CUHK, with research on networking and systems, particularly machine learning systems and data center networks. In February 2026, he gives a keynote on AI infrastructure at the NINeS 2026 HKUST pod and at the Secure & Scalable Machine Learning Symposium 2026 in Thailand.

Career

  1. NowChinese University of Hong KongAssociate Professor
  2. 2013–2020City University of Hong Kong

Education

  1. 2013University of TorontoPh.D.
  2. 2009University of TorontoM.A.Sc.
  3. 2007Chinese University of Hong KongB.Eng.

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Henry Hong Xu. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes Chinese University of Hong Kong. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.
  3. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Chinese University of Hong Kong. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Chinese University of Hong Kong. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Henry Hong Xu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Henry Hong Xu – CUHK CSE cse.cuhk.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Hong XU - The Chinese University of Hong Kong research.cuhk.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Prof. Hong Xu received the Best Paper Award from ACM SIGCOMM 2022 – CUHK CSE cse.cuhk.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. acm sigcomm - Best Paper Award sigcomm.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Accelerating Distributed MoE Training and Inference with Lina | USENIX usenix.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [2210.17223] Accelerating Distributed MoE Training and Inference with Lina arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Publications – Hong Xu henryhxu.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. [2509.03018] Mycroft: Tracing Dependencies in Collective Communication Towards Reliable LLM Training arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Publications – Minlan Yu minlanyu.seas.harvard.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Ph.D. Student Shaofeng Wu from Prof. Hong Xu’s Lab Receives NSDI’26 Community Award – CUHK CSE cse.cuhk.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Offloading Cloud Network Services at Production Scale with SONiC DASH SmartSwitch | USENIX usenix.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. Hong Xu, Henry henryhxu.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.