Siu-Wah Lau

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About

Siu-Wah Lau is a pioneering researcher in multimedia storage systems, whose work has fundamentally shaped cost-effective architectures for handling large-scale digital media. His key research areas include near-line storage servers, data layout policies, and scheduling algorithms for multimedia information systems. Lau’s major contribution lies in challenging the conventional assumption that multimedia storage must rely solely on expensive online disk systems. Instead, he proposed a two-tier architecture that integrates a robotic tape library as vast near-line storage with online disks as the front-line cache. This innovative approach dramatically reduces costs while maintaining acceptable performance for streaming and retrieval. His seminal 2002 paper, “A cost-effective near-line storage server for multimedia system” (23 citations), and his earlier 1997 work, “Scheduling and data layout policies for a near-line multimedia storage architecture” (20 citations), are foundational references in the field. These studies introduced novel scheduling and data layout policies that optimize access times and throughput in tape-based systems. Lau’s research remains highly influential for engineers designing scalable, economical storage solutions for video-on-demand, digital libraries, and archival systems.