Prof. Li Youping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, is a renowned electronic and communication specialist. He was born in 1935 and graduated from the Radio Engineering Department of Nanjing Institute of Technology (now: Southeast University) in 1957. In the succeeding 3 years, he studied at the Radio Engineering Department of Tsinghua University. Subsequently, he served in the Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering (now: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China) from 1959 to 1964. In October 1964, he was appointed to serve in the China Academy of Engineering Physics. In March 2011, he returned back to Southeast University to found the Future Network Research Center (FNRC). In his career, Prof. Li has won many important awards, including the first prize of State Scientific and Technological Progress Award, the second prize of State Technological Invention Award, some prizes of Scientific and Technological Awards of National Defense, and the He Liang He Li Science and Technology Progress Award. Moreover, he was granted the title of “Young and Middle-aged Expert with Outstanding Contributions at the National Level” in 1988 and elected as an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1999.
Prof. Li occupies himself in the academic community beyond 60 years and is still serving in the prospective research. His career can be roughly divided into two periods, before 2000 and after 2000. In the former period, he devoted himself to study in the nuclear electronic systems and achieved numerous significant contributions in this area. In the later period, he was absorbed in his research on innovative future Internet architecture and proposed many valuable insights into the development of the Internet architecture. From March 2011, Prof. Li served as the director of the Future Network Research Center of Southeast University. Under his leadership, the FNRC research group accomplished a series of achievements in terms of dual-structural network and Uniform Content Label (UCL). For the dual-structural network, it integrates the Internet architecture with a complementary secondary structure characterized as the combination of broadcast transmission and ubiquitous storage. As to the UCL, it is an innovative content metadata, which can be utilized to establish a comprehensive content Big Data identification scheme for Cyber contents. On December 29, 2017, the format specification of UCL was officially adopted as the national standard of the People's Republic of China by the National Standardization Administration Committee, No. GB/T 35304-2017. It is a significant breakthrough for Southeast University not only in establishing the national standard but also in the development of its first-class computer science.
