Professor Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou

She received several grants for research projects aimed at making computer systems more reliable by detecting software bugs, creating automated logs to diagnose software issues, and using software components to adapt to system variability. She is quoted as saying, "Fundamentally, my research is about making computer systems less vulnerable to attacks so they crash less". She is studying ways that software and hardware can be used to detect bugs, especially those in parallel and distributed programs. "Right now, cell phones, laptops, and desktops have multicore processors, but to take advantage of this kind of processing, programs need to be concurrent", she says. She wants to use data-flow invariance to detect various types of software bugs and make software more secure. To deal with computer crashes, she proposes diagnosing the problem at the source using automatic log inference and informative logging. She is also part of a multi-university research effort that is studying the role that software can play in new, energy-efficient computers. She was the recipient for the Alfred Sloan Fellowship 2007, UIUC Gear Faculty Award 2006, NSF Career-2004 award, the CRA-W Anita-Borg Early Career Award 2005, the DOE Early Career Principle Investigator Award 2005, the IBM Faculty Award 2004 & 2005, and the IBM SUR-2003 award. In 2007, she co-founded her 2nd startup and remains as the CTO of PatternInsight; a spin off from her research group. This group has deployed solutions currently used by many large commercial companies.