Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou

CTO of PatternInsight, a spin-off from her research group that has deployed software quality and security solutions used by many large commercial companies, Zhou co-founded the startup in 2007.

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. Zhou was quoted as saying, "Fundamentally, my research is about making computer systems less vulnerable to attacks so they crash less." She studied ways that software and hardware could 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 said.

She wanted to use data-flow invariance to detect various types of software bugs and make software more secure. To deal with computer crashes, Zhou proposed diagnosing the problem at the source using automatic log inference and informative logging. She has also been part of a multi-university research effort that studied the role that software could play in new, energy-efficient computers.

She is the recipient of 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.