# Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou

> Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou is the San Diego-based co-founder and CEO of Whova and an emeritus professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego. A Princeton-trained computer scientist, she co-founded Emphora and Pattern Insight before Whova, and received the 2015 ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for work on detecting and recovering from defects in complex computer systems.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at Whova
- **Organizations:** Whova, University of California San Diego, Pattern Insight, Emphora, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, NEC Labs
- **Education:** B.S. in Computer Science, Peking University, M.A. in Computer Science, Princeton University, Ph.D. in Computer Science, Princeton University
- **Known for:** ACM Fellow, 2013., IEEE Fellow, 2015., ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, 2015.

## Career timeline

- **1992** — Completed a B.S. in Computer Science at Peking University.
- **1996** — Completed an M.A. in Computer Science at Princeton.
- **2000** — Completed her Princeton Ph.D.; thesis: Memory Management for Networked Servers; advisors Kai Li and Douglas Clark.
- **2000–2002** — Worked at NEC Labs and co-founded storage startup Emphora.
- **2002–2009** — Faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, becoming a tenured associate professor.
- **2006–2007** — Co-founded Pattern Insight; public university accounts date its founding to 2006, while her personal biography gives 2007.
- **2009** — Joined UC San Diego as the first Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing.
- **2012** — VMware acquired Pattern Insight’s Log Insight business and associated team.
- **2013** — Began developing Whova with colleagues from her research community.
- **2014** — Whova began charging for its service late in the year.
- **2015** — Received the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.
- **2022** — Shared an ASPLOS Most Influential Paper Award for the 2008 concurrency-bug study.
- **2026** — Listed as emeritus faculty by UC San Diego’s systems and networking group and university profile directory.

## Achievements

- ACM Fellow, 2013.
- IEEE Fellow, 2015.
- ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, 2015.
- ASPLOS Most Influential Paper Award, 2022, with Shan Lu, Soyeon Park and Eunsoo Seo, for their 2008 concurrency-bug study.
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, 2007.
- NSF CAREER Award, 2004.
- CRA-W Anita Borg Early Career Award, 2005.
- Co-founded three companies: Emphora, Pattern Insight and Whova.

## Latest updates

- **2025-02** — Whova introduced its MicroEvents annual subscription add-on for smaller events.
- **2024-04** — OPERA’s publication list includes her co-authored EuroSys 2024 paper Effective Bug Detection with Unused Definitions.

## Links

- Website: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~yyzhou/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yyzhou
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/yyzhou

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/yuanyuan-zhou
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-27