YY Zhou / More Reliable Computing

Calit2's Tiffany Fox wrote a nice profile on Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou, a computer science professor here at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

“People always ask why their systems fail, and the computer industry is starting to pay attention to this reliability issue,” explains Zhou, who joined the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the Jacobs School of Engineering in the summer of 2009. “Fundamentally, my research is about making computer systems less vulnerable to attacks so they crash less. When Windows crashes, it’s more of an inconvenience, but when an e-commerce site crashes it can really be a problem.”


Zhou is the first holder of the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing. The chair is one of four established in the Jacobs School of Engineering through Qualcomm’s original $15 million commitment to the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Read the story on the Calit2 news site.

Check out a few more great photos of computer sicnece professor YY Zhou taken by Erik Jepsen on the Calit2 Flickr site.

Car Electronics Expert / Computer Science Professor on NPR's Science Friday

Car electronics / car software / computer science professor Ingolf Krueger picked up the Science Friday microphone on April 30 and shared his knowledge with Ira Flatow and with the world.

Listen to the NPR Science Friday show here:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201004301

Two computer science graduate students working in Krueger's lab presented related work recently at the Jacobs School Research Expo 2010. A summary of their poster presentation is below:

Diagnostic Systems for Cars

Computer science Ph.D. students Massimiliano Menarini and Filippo Seracini are analyzing automotive diagnostics with an eye toward improving them. The modern car is a heterogeneous system made up of components from many different suppliers, and implementation of the diagnostic system is often treated as a byproduct of the software implementation. Menarini and Seracini are part of a team looking to remedy this situation. Their service-oriented software architecture approach, which offers solutions for integrating heterogeneous systems, is already being used in disaster response and environmental monitoring projects. One challenge: deploying just enough computer code to identify and report all failures to the driver — while still enabling repair centers to connect testing equipment to the vehicle and identify all details of the failure.