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Personality Profile |
Bill Duff,
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Kwok Soohoo was born in China in 1950 and spent his childhood in Hong Kong. He came to the U.S. when he was 15 years old. After adjusting to the cultural shock and receiving a crash course in English, he completed high school and went on to college at Fordham University majoring in Physics. He graduated in 1972 with a BS degree and then went to graduate school at Columbia University, studying Geophysics. His goal was to obtain a PhD and enter a career in mining engineering or oil exploration; however, his summer job at IBM turned out to be a fork in the road. The challenge and opportunity of designing multi-million dollar computers lured him away from Geophysics.
He joined IBM in 1973 in the Field Engineering Division in New York City servicing large system accounts in mid-town Manhattan. He was working full time while attending Columbia University part time taking classes in Geophysics and Computer Science. In 1975, he joined IBM Poughkeepsie's Large System Development Laboratory as a logic designer working on the System 370 family of computers. He spent the next three years designing and supporting channel subsystem and attached processors for the state of the art largest single imaged commercial systems. Next he spent one year traveling worldwide while providing system and manufacturing support dealing with critical situation resolutions.
In 1979, he was exposed to the world of EMC when he was assigned to support a system that was going through the German VDE EMI certification testing. He met Dr.Chang-Yu Wu, founder of the Poughkeepsie EMC Laboratory, and was intrigued and fascinated by the challenges facing the EMC engineers. This turned out to be a crucial career turning point in Kwok's life. He accepted an offer to work in the EMC department where he has spent the last 22 years mastering the art of EMC while trying to keep pace with the explosive growth of computer technology.
His colleague Dr. Wu offered a humorous explanation why EMC is still an art rather than science: "To the neophytes EMC stands for Electromagnetic Compatibility, to the seasoned engineers EMC stands for Even More Confused, and to veteran experts EMC stands for Ever More Confused." In other words, the more we learn about EMC, the more awareness we gain about the missing puzzle pieces of our knowledge gaps. Seriously, at the moment even the world's fastest supercomputer does not have sufficient resources to totally model and accurately predict the EMI emission from a small personal computer due to the number of variables and complex interactions involved.
Kwok is a Senior Engineer currently responsible for the P-Series and Z-Series large computing system/server EMC developments; over the past 22 years he has worked on every S/370, S/390 and Power Parallel IBM system developed in Poughkeepsie. Some of the more famous computers include the 9076 Deep Blue Supercomputer that defeated the Russian Chess Champion Gary Karparov and the current number one ranked supercomputer in the world "the ASCI White" installed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in New Mexico. Thanks to Kwok's conscientious efforts, corporate America can sleep better knowing that their systems were designed with years of proven expertise and experience.
To round out his background in computer hardware design, Kwok recently went back to school and acquired an MS degree in Electrical Engineering from Union College.
Kwok is very active in both IEEE EMC Symposia and annual DoD E3 Conferences. He has presented paper(s) every year for the last four years either in domestic or international EMC symposia. He gave a talk on EMC at the Northern CaoTung University in Beijing at the invitation of Professor Zhang, Linchang (1997 International IEEE EMC Symposium Chairman in Beijing and Chairman of the Beijing IEEE Executive Committee). He also served as a Member of the Technical Committee for the 1997 International EMC Symposium in Beijing, China; CEEM 2000 (Second Asia-Pacific Conference on Environmental Electromagnetics) in Shanghai; and in addition he chaired two technical sessions in the Washington DC International IEEE EMC Symposium last year. He has also accepted an invitation from Professor Gao Yougang (Chairman) to serve on the Technical Committee for the 2002 International EMC Symposium in Beijing.
Kwok is an IEEE Senior Member and has also earned a senior grade as a NARTE-Certified EMC and ESD Control Engineer. With all the denial of service attacks waged on the Internet, Kwok is very much interested in assessing the threats of electronic terrorism. Dr. William Radasky, Chairman of the IEC Sub-Committee SC77C on High Power Electromagnetic Phenomena, invited him to attend the briefing in Switzerland, as an industry observer, this past February. By gathering the facts and understanding the reality and nature of the threats he can then provide proper guidance for the future system design in a proactive manner.
On a personal note, Kwok Soohoo is married and has two children. His wife Fanny is a programming consultant at IBM. Their major challenge is trying to figure out ways of raising money to pay for their daughters' tuition. His older daughter Stephanie graduated from MIT last year and is currently enrolled in New York Medical College. His other daughter is Christina who will be a senior this fall. She is studying Biochemistry at Harvard with a goal of obtaining a PhD in the field of genetics. Kwok Soohoo may be reached at ksoohoo@us.ibm.com . EMC