Gong Li (), also known in English as Li Gong, is a Chinese businessman and computer scientist. He is CEO of Linaro, a British software company headquartered in Cambridge, UK, developing systems software for the Arm ecosystem. He was previously the founder and CEO of Acadine Technologies, a systems software company specializing in mobile operating systems for mobile, wearable, and IoT devices. Acadine's core product H5OS was a web-centric operating system that was primarily based on the open web standard HTML5. It was derived from Firefox OS, whose development Li had overseen as president of Mozilla Corporation.
Education
Born and raised in Beijing, Gong obtained B.S./M.S. at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, all in computer science.
Academic achievements
Li Gong has 22 issued US patents and co-authored three books (published by Addison Wesley and O'Reilly), many technical articles, and 8 general articles in the science journal Nature. He won the Best Paper Award at the 1989 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and received the 1994 Leonard G. Abraham Prize given by the IEEE Communications Society for "the most significant contribution to technical literature in the field of interest of the IEEE."
Career
Li Gong started his career as a researcher, primarily in the fields of computer systems, networking, and information security. He was both program chair and general conference chair for ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, and IEEE CSFW. He was associate editor of ACM TISSEC and associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Internet Computing. Before going into the industry, he first worked at Odyssey Research in Ithaca, New York, and later at the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. He held visiting positions at Cornell and Stanford and was a guest chair professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
In 1996, he joined the JavaSoft division at Sun Microsystems (in Cupertino, California) as chief Java security architect and designed the security architecture of the Java platform. He became a distinguished engineer and later headed engineering for Java Embedded Server and JXTA, and was the founding chair of the Java Expert Group at the international standard organization OSGi and led the OSGi 1.0 specification.
In 2001, he founded the Sun Microsystems Engineering and Research Institute (ERI) in China, where he was general manager and led the team working on Solaris system, browser, OpenOffice and related desktop software research and development.
In 2005, he joined Microsoft as general manager to lead MSN in China and served as vice president of the Microsoft China R&D Group. He led Beijing and Shanghai teams working in many areas across all the services MSN offered — including Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, Safety, Mobile, Search, Ads platform, and Virtual Earth.
In 2007, Gong joined Mozilla Corporation to found its China subsidiary Mozilla Online Ltd where he was chairman and CEO. Four years later, he founded Mozilla Taiwan and was CEO. Later, he worked in a number of executive roles at Mozilla's headquarters, including senior vice president of mobile devices, president of Asia operations, chief operating officer, and president.
He left Mozilla in April 2015, and started Acadine Technologies, initially under the name "Gone Fishing". a Hong Kong entity controlled by Tsinghua University and the Chinese government.