Kenneth L. Ho

CV

Kenneth L. Ho

Academic and Employment History

07/2021 – Technical Manager, Optimal Pattern Correction, TSMC, San Jose, CA
06/2019 – 12/2020 Visiting Scholar/Consultant, CCM, Flatiron Institute, New York, NY
08/2017 – 06/2021 Principal Engineer, Optimal Pattern Correction, TSMC, San Jose, CA
08/2015 – 08/2017 Sr. Engineer, Optimal Pattern Correction, TSMC, San Jose, CA
01/2013 – 07/2015 NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, Mathematics, Stanford
09/2012 – 12/2012 Visiting Scholar, Courant Institute, NYU
08/2012 Visiting Scholar, Theoretical Systems Biology, Imperial College London
06/2012 – 08/2012 Assistant Research Scientist, Courant Institute, NYU
06/2010 – 02/2012 Intern/Consultant, Schrödinger, New York, NY
09/2007 – 05/2012 Ph.D., Computational Biology (Mathematics), Courant Institute, NYU
09/2006 – 12/2006 Affiliate Student, Mathematics, University College London
09/2003 – 06/2007 B.S. (with honor), Applied and Computational Mathematics, Caltech

Technical Summary

  • Applied mathematics Ph.D. with broad training in computer science, statistics, biology, and chemistry
  • Roughly three-stage career so far across both academia (3 years postdoc) and industry (8+ years)
  • First, as an early graduate student, I started in mathematical biology and computational chemistry. Research highlights: mechanistic modeling of apoptosis and “trimer” theory for bistability; automated all-atom protein crystal structure refinement; algebraic methods for model selection of chemical reaction networks.
  • Then during later graduate studies (with Leslie Greengard) and continuing through my postdoc (with Lexing Ying), I moved into scientific computing and numerical linear algebra, specifically fast direct solvers and other generalizations of the fast multipole method: O(N) generalized LU decomposition for hierarchical matrices, e.g., for solving integral equations and PDEs; applications to chemistry, physics, and statistics; open-source MATLAB software; O(N log N) butterfly factorization for high-frequency scattering and Fourier integral operators.
  • Now I work in computational lithography and software engineering as a lead developer on TSMC's in-house simulator for OPC/ILT/SMO: numerical methods, computational infrastructure, software design; optics theory and fast TCC; high-performance computing, CPU/GPU acceleration; computational electromagnetics, inverse problems, numerical optimization, machine learning.
  • Computing: C, C++, CUDA, Fortran, Julia, LaTeX, MATLAB, MPI, Octave, OpenMP, Python
  • Awards: NSF graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, NYU dissertation award, Caltech merit award and research fellowship
  • 20 peer-reviewed publications, 9 patents, 47 conference/seminar presentations, 8 open-source codes
  • Google Scholar: 6gr2NYwAAAAJ (1100+ citations); ORCID: 0000-0001-5450-4966; GitHub: klho

Publications, Presentations, Codes, and Teaching

Please see the individual pages for publications, presentations, codes, and teaching.