Systems, Man & Cybernetics - July 2017 - 26

Profiles

The Work and
Career Path of
Haibin Zhu

aibin Zhu is a full professor
and coordinator of the computer science program at Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario,
Canada, which he joined in 2002. He
is also the founding director of the
Collaborative Systems Laboratory
and the founding researcher of rolebased collaboration (RBC) and adaptive collaboration.
Zhu was born and raised in an
average-income working-class family
living in Kenli County, Shandong Province, China. During his childhood, as
one of three children in his family, he
did not exhibit special talents or skills
compared to his peers but adopted a
motto: "to do his very best" in any situation. This tenacity helped to keep him
at the top of his class throughout his
early school years.
After passing his college entrance
examination (Gaokao) in 1979, he applied for university studies with an option of "obeying arrangement," as it was
established at the beginning of China's
reform and open era. Fortunately, he
was directed to the Engineering and
Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, China, and invited to study computer engineering, a subject about which he knew
nothing at the time. Driven by his motto,
he vigorously worked for four years and
graduated at the top of his class.
During his practicum course, he
participated in a study of the central
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSMC.2017.2701899
Date of publication: 19 July 2017

processing unit (CPU) design utilized
in a main-frame computer named J-130.
The system was created by a team of his
instructors and other engineers. The
course student team was supervised
by Wu Jiangxing, a future academician
of engineering and leading figure in the
field of engineering in communication
technologies in China. Programming
tools in that era included paper, pens,
and occasionally punched tapes.
Zhu's love of programming was
inspired by an early undergraduate
assignment where he used nine lines
of machine code instead of the suggested 11-line solution. He started his
research career while he was a gradu-

ate student of software engineering in
the Department of Computer Engineering at the National University of
Defense Technology, China.
On a VAX-11/785 computer with
a virtual memory operating system,
while working in C language, he and
his fellow researchers established the
first object-oriented programming platform, called Guo Wu Object-Oriented
Software Environment (GWOOSE), in
China in 1991. They developed the program platform under the supervision of
Prof. Chen Huowang, who was among
the top professors of software engineering in China and was subsequently
promoted to be the academician of engineering. GWOOSE was a complete
implementation of Smalltalk-80, including the multiwindow interface, the virtual machine, the byte-code compiler,
and the interpreter. The platform was
awarded a first-class prize from the
Ministry of National Defense Science
and Technology, China, in 1991. Zhu's
research career in China gained momentum after the publication of his first

Zhu explaining the visualization of dynamic role assignment. From left:
James Green, Zhu, and Tyler Kennedy. (Photo courtesy of the Marketing
Department at Nipissing University.)

IEEE SYSTEMS, MAN, & CYBERNETICS MAGAZINE Ju ly 2017

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