Dr. Hungwen Li is an adjunct professor at Computer Engineering Department of San Jose State University after more than 30 years of service in industry. He teaches Distributed Systems and Security Algorithms. In 1983, Dr. Li joined IBM Research Center and conducted research in different aspects of large scale computing systems. In the decade with IBM, he published one book, 6 book chapters, 7 patents, and 70 journal and conference papers. Transforming career from research to development, Dr. Li joined an ambitious start-up, HAL Computer Systems which was later acquired by Fujitsu, where he led the architecture team. In a period of 10 years at HAL, Dr. Li assumed various responsibilities including Manager, Director, Vice President and General Manager. After HAL, Dr. Li founded RedSwitch and created the first 10-Gigabit switch fabric in industry. He was CEO/President/Founder of RedSwitch until RedSwitch was acquired by Agilent in 2002. Dr. Li held several executive positions after RedSwitch including GM in Agilent, CMO in Huahong (Shanghai), and CMO/VP in Trident Microsystems. Dr. Li is a frequent speaker and has given more than 100 invited talks.

Abstract

FinTech applications have demonstrated their innovation and diversity beyond the first use case in digital currency. These new applications adopt various techniques related to data, security and network services in a highly distributed and decentralized environment. The FinTech applications may appear diversified on the surface, however, a deeper investigation into these applications reveals that they are enabled by the same set of four core technologies including hashing, public key cryptography, Proof-of-Work, and Peer-to-Peer network. This talk describes the four enabling technologies for the FinTech applications and identifies the area to improve in the enabling technology.