Short Biography
Dr. Yuanyuan(YY) Zhou is currently a Qualcomm Chair Professor at UC-San Diego. Dr. Zhou is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow, Winner of 2015 ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, and obtained her Ph.D from Princeton University. Before UCSD, she was a tenured associate professor at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). Her research interests span the areas of operating systems, data centers, software quality and reliability, and system management.  She has co-founded three startups. Her 2nd startup, PatternInsight, has successfully deployed software quality assurance tools in many companies and in 2012 its Log Insight business line was acquired by VmWare and now Log Insight is a VmWare Product offering to its many data center customers.   Her 3rd startup, Whova, has provided solutions for more than 3000 conferences in 83 countries. She has the great fortune of working with many talented students and colleagues.  Many of her students are successful entrepreneurs, or tenured/tenure-track professors at top universities.  

Title:  Closing the gap between industry and academia

Abstract:
 While research and academia often focus on different goals, there is no clear boundary between the two.  In this talk, I would like to share my personal journey in commercializing research to industrial products as well as how to get research inspiration from industrial problems. More specifically, I will share a few lessons in how to take  a research prototype to build a commercial product, become a product that has been deployed in large companies, and later pushed into thousands of data centers (after the acquisition by VmWare).  Moreover, I will also briefly describe how my past startup experiences had inspired me to change my research area from storage systems to tackle software reliability and diagnosibility from a new perspective.