What is programming like in a traditional telecommunication company? Through the eyes of an IT veteran who recently moved to the CT (Communication Technologies) industry, I will talk about the unique challenges in programming technologies faced by the CT industry, and the striking similarity between IT and CT in their vision of the future. To give an idea of “when rubber meets the road”, I will focus on one on-going project where we use programming abstraction and compilation technology to significantly improve the productivity of 5G BaseBand programming and share some of the lessons and tips learned.

Peng Wu joined Huawei US research lab in 2014 as Chief Scientist on Multicore and Parallel System Software. She now serves as the director for the newly founded Programming Technologies Lab in the Central Software Institute of Huawei. As the first director of the Programming Technologies Lab, she is interested in all aspects of programming systems including programming models, (dynamic) language VMs, and intelligent programming services.

Before joining Huawei, Peng Wu was a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson research center for more than a decade. During her IBM years, she has made major contribution to IBM’s product C/C++/Fortran compilers and Java VM and has done extensive research on SIMD programming, scripting languages VM, trace compilation, transactional memory, and software-hardware co-design. She held more than 20 patents.

Peng Wu received her PhD in computer science from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2001. She continues to be actively engaged in the research community. She has co-authored more than 30 papers (including a best paper award in PACT’12) and has helped organize and served as PCs in many technical conferences. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 2012. For more information, check out http://pengwu.wordpress.com/.