By Chris Barrett ’08
People open half a trillion Adobe PDFs a year, and Tong Sun (‘96) and her team at Adobe want to reinvent how millions work with them using artificial intelligence (AI). The goal puts Adobe squarely in the hyper-competitive AI race, but Sun started the race three decades ago at the University of Rhode Island (URI).
Recruited to URI in 1992 by Professor Qing “Ken” Yang, Sun joined a lab studying high-performance computer systems processing massive amounts of scientific data like nuclear reactions, physics simulations and weather forecasts. Under Yang’s guidance, his student researchers aimed to make computers think and calculate faster to solve problems quicker.
“It wasn’t AI yet but the way you focused on the pioneering design, how you designed the computer on the front lines, it was very inspiring,” Sun says.
For decades, creative use of mathematics has underpinned advancements in computing and allowed the mining of larger and larger datasets. At URI, Sun found her doctoral advisor at the forefront of applying mathematical concepts to computing.
Yang applied the concept of prime numbers—numbers divisible only by 1 and themselves—typically used in number theory to computer memory design. By using these numbers to reimagine how data could be stored and retrieved, he created a cache memory architecture that dramatically reduced chip area and improved performance. That simple act of connecting dots—linking a concept from mathematics to a hardware challenge—led to patents and a successful company.
“That experience shaped how I think about invention,” Sun says. “Connecting existing solutions to a new problem is invention. Framing the problem is important, but seeing unexpected connections is what moves technology forward.”
Now director of Adobe’s Document Intelligence Lab, Sun works to advance the pioneering software company into the AI era. She likes to say that she wants computers to be smarter, not just faster. Her team members do not seek incremental change; they aim to reinvent how people interact with PDFs. Instead of reading a summary of a hundred drab PDFs, you could have a conversation with documents or ask the Adobe AI Assistant to generate a video summary that uncovers the emerging opportunities and risks across financial reports.
“URI was very rigorous and always challenged me. That’s the kind of environment that shapes you for life.”Tong Sun
To deliver the technology Sun oversees a team including young engineers. She often reminds the team of the mindset she learned at URI.
“Sometimes we already have the right solution,” she says, “we just haven’t discovered the problem it can solve.”
Sun says she learned how to inspire emerging researchers from Yang. Each week, he asked her to read a scientific paper and present it without him having read it first. The exercise forced her to anticipate tough questions and think critically about the paper’s methods and results. And, vitally, the process led her to think about how to define a problem and find a solution without a benchmark and when others tried and failed.
Today, she asks her interns to take the same approach. And through such mentorships and her work with the Grace Hopper Mentoring Networks, Sun hopes to encourage more young women to stay in science and enter a computer industry that needs their voices.
One such researcher is Wei Peng. She credits Sun’s mentorship with helping launch her career while an intern at Xerox’s Data Analytics Research Lab where Sun served as director. The center developed social media mining tools powered by state-of-the-art machine learning models, similar to models used by today’s AI. Peng says her experience with Sun broadened her research perspective and encouraged her to speak up, take initiative and lead.
“She has a rare ability to connect the dots between academic research and real-world impact,” says Peng who went on to become a Xerox researcher and publish with Sun.
Sun urges researchers to explore full-stack thinking by looking at technology from
the chip level all the way up to the user experience. Her holistic approach that helps lead to better technical optimization and efficiency and, ultimately, meaningful technological innovation.
“That holistic view started for me at URI,” Sun says. “Even in the early ’90s, URI faculty were connecting electrical engineering, signal processing, and computer architecture into what became the foundation of high-performance computing.”
In the three decades since, URI has continued to build on that holistic view. The University has launched undergraduate and graduate programs in analytics and artificial intelligence, data science, and data analytics. In 2025, the Institute for AI & Computational Research opened to bring together researchers from across campus to position URI as a leader in AI, data science, high-performance computing, and quantum computing.
Together, the initiatives and new facilities like the Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering give the next generation of URI students the same opportunities as Sun. “URI was very rigorous and always challenged me,” Sun says. “That’s the kind of environment that shapes you for life.”
“She has a rare ability to connect the dots between academic research and real-world impact.”Wei Peng