I am a researcher staff member with the Shenzhen Research Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and also a postdoc fellow with the View Lab in Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I obtained an MPhil degree and a PhD degree in computer science from The Chinese Unviersity of Hong Kong in 2006 and 2009, respectively. My thesis advisors were Prof. Michael R. Lyu and Prof. Jiangchuan Liu (now with Simon Fraser University, Canada). I received my B.Sc. degree from School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University in 2000.

I am interested in distributed computing and networking, particularly in the Internet of Things, Sensor Networks, and Cloud Computing. My on-going research is on their practical applications and their software reliability engineering issues (e.g., fault management, fault tolerance, testing, and fault localization/removal).

I enjoy conducting joint research with other universities. I have been working closely with Prof. Jiangchuan Liu as an external member of his group for over seven years. I was also a visiting scholar in his Multimedia and Wireless Networking lab at Simon Fraser University in 2009. I am also working closely with the National Key Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Processing at National University of Defense Technology on cloud computing research. I've been visiting the lab frequently since 2009. We are doing the national 973 project "Fundamental Research on Highly Efficient/Effective and Trustworthy Internet-Based Virtual Computing Environments", a joint project also with many researchers from Peking University, Tsinghua University, and many other top universities in China. We are also working on the software relibility engineering issues for the future Internet of Things (IoT), specifically, on how to make high quality end-user software for the IoT..

I am also active in technology consulting in telecommunication/information technology industry. Currently I am helping Huawei Technologies, the largest networking and telecommunications equipment supplier in Asia, on software fault management and software reliability engineering issues. Specifically, I've written on over-100-page English report on how to use fault tolerance patterns to solve the company's unique system design problems.

I've also been working in industrial area for several years as hardware engineer with Huawei Technologies (the department where I was working is now part of Emerson Network Power), later software engineer with Ramaxel Ltd. and Yongda Electronics Ltd, all in China. I wrote a memory tester for Ramaxel. The company was the largest memory manufactory in China and 4th largest memory manufactory in the world at that time which made memories for most branded PCs in China. The tester was the sole tester the company adopted. As a result, it is interesting that the codes I wrote were ran by most branded PCs in China. This should probably be comparable to what Microsoft has achieved :). In Yongda, my colleagues and I designed and coded the authorization and encryption modules (X.501 CA, RA and an SSL-like communication module) for a railway ticket transaction system. The system is now widely adopted in China, meaning that most of the railway tickets sold in China were actually authorizated by our codes.

You may be interested in more about me.

• Cloud Computing

[1] Yu Kang, Yangfan Zhou, Zibin Zheng, and Michael R. Lyu.A User Experience-based Cloud Service Redeployment Mechanism, in Proc. of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (Cloud'11), Washington, DC, Jul. 4-9, 2011. (Accept Rate: 18%)

[2] Haibo Mi, Huaimin Wang, Gang Yin, Hua Cai, Qi Zhou, Tingtao Sun, and Yangfan Zhou. Magnifier: Online Detection of Performance Problems in Large-Scale Cloud Computing Systems, in Proc. of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Service Computing (SCC'11), Washington, DC, Jul. 4-9, 2011.

[3] Haibo Mi, Huaimin Wang, Gang Yin, Yangfan Zhou, Dianxi Shi, and Lin Yuan. Online Self-reconfiguration with Performance Guarantee for Energy-efficient Large-scale Cloud Computing Data Centers, in Proc. of the 7th International Conference on Services Computing (SCC'10), Miami, FL, Jul. 5-10, 2010.

• Internet of Things / Sensor Networks

[4] Yangfan Zhou, Xinyu Chen, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. Sengraphy: Linking Source Codes to Execution Process for Verifying Sensor Network Applications via Rule Mining and Visualization. Submitted.

[6] Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. A Fan-out Index and Its Application to Coverage-oriented Partitioning in Wireless Sensor Networks, Submitted.

[5] Junjie Xiong, Edith Ngai, Yangfan Zhou, and Michael R. Lyu. RealProct: Reliable Protocol Conformance Testing with Real Nodes for Wireless Sensor Networks. in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), Changsha, China, November 2011.

[7] Yangfan Zhou, Xinyu Chen, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. Sentomist: Unveiling Transient Sensor Network Bugs via Symptom Mining, in Proc. of the 30th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'10), Genoa, Italy, Jun. 21-25, 2010. (Accept Rate: 14% - 84/585)

[8] Edith C.-H. Ngai, Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. A Delay-Aware Reliable Event Reporting Framework for Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks, Ad Hoc Networks, Vol. 8, No. 7, pp. 694-707, 2010. (SCI Indexed)

[9] Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. Surviving Holes and Barriers in Geographic Data Reporting for Wireless Sensor Networks, in Proc. of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS'09), Macau S.A.R., Oct. 12-15, 2009. (Accept Rate: 25%)

[10] Yangfan Zhou, Junjie Xiong, Michael R. Lyu, Jiangchuan Liu, and Kam-Wing Ng. Energy-efficient On-demand Contour Service for Wireless Sensor Networks, in Proc. of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS'09), Macau S.A.R., Oct. 12-15, 2009. (Accept Rate: 25%)

[11] Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu.On Sensor Network Reconfiguration for Downtime-Free System Migration, ACM/Springer Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET), Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 241-252, April, 2009. (SCI Indexed)

[12] Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. On Sensor Network Reconfiguration Problem for Downtime-Free System Migrations, In Proc. of the 5th ICST International Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness (QShine'08), Hong Kong, China, July, 2008. (One of the best papers selected to be published in ACM/Springer MONET)

[13] Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. An Index-Based Sensor-Grouping Mechanism for Field Coverage Wireless Sensor Networks, In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC'08), Beijing, China, May, 2008.

[14] Edith C.-H. Ngai, Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. LOFT: A Latency-Oriented Fault Tolerant Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks, In Proc. of the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GlobeCom'07), Washington, DC, USA, November, 2007.

[15] Yangfan Zhou, Edith C.-H. Ngai, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. POWER-SPEED: A Power-Controlled Real-Time Data Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks, In Proc. of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC'07), Hong Kong, China, 11-15 March, 2007.

[16] Yangfan Zhou and Michael R. Lyu. An Energy-Efficient Mechanism for Self-Monitoring Sensor Web, In Proc. of the 28th IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, USA, 3-10 March, 2007.

[17] Edith. C.-H. Ngai, Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. Reliable Reporting of Delay-Sensitive Events in Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks, In Proc. of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS'06), Vancouver, Canada, Oct. 9-12, 2006.(Accept Rate: 25%)

[18] Yangfan Zhou, Haixuan Yang, Michael R. Lyu, and Edith C.-H. Ngai. A Point-Distribution Index And Its Application to Sensor Grouping in Wireless Sensor Networks, In Proc. of the International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC'06), Vancouver, Canada, July 3-6, 2006.

[19] Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, and Jiangchuan Liu. On Setting up Energy-Efficient Paths with Transmitter Power Control in Wireless Sensor Networks, In Proc. of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS'05), Washington, DC, USA, November 7-10, 2005. (Accept Rate: 25%)

[20] Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, Jiangchuan Liu, and Hui Wang. PORT: A Price-Oriented Reliable Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, In Proc. of the 16th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE'05), Chicago, IL, USA, November 8-11, 2005. (Accept Rate: 25%)

I maintained a list of References on Wireless Sensor Networks many years ago, which might also be of your interest.

• Member
  • IEEE (Since 2004)
  • HKCS: Hong Kong Computer Society (Since 2008)
  • ICST: Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
  • ComSoc: IEEE Communications Society
• Technical Program Committee Member
  • The International Workshop on Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment (iVCE'12), 11 April, 2012, Shenzhen, China
  • The 8th IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC'11), 4-9 July, 2011, Washington, DC
  • The 7th IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC'10), 5-10 July, 2010, Miami, FL
  • The 2nd Beijing-Hong Kong PHD Forum, 2-6 July, 2007, Hong Kong
• Journal Reviewer
  • ACM/Springer Journal of Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET)
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
  • IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
  • IEEE Transactions on Reliability
  • IEEE Transactions on Computers
  • International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing
  • International Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
• Conference Reviewer (Area 1: Networks and Systems)
  • The IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'07'10)
  • The IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'10)
  • The IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'05, '06, '07, '08, '09)
  • The IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS'04, '06, '07)
  • The IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS'06, '07)
  • The IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (Globecom'05, '06, '07, '09)
  • The IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC'06, '08)
  • The IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC'07, '10)
  • The 14th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'09)
  • The International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (MSN'06)
  • The IEEE International Conference on Sensor Networks, Ubiquitous, and Trustworthy Computing (SUTC'06, '08)
  • The Annual Conference on Communication Networks and Services Research (CNSR'08)
  • The International Conference on Communications and Networking in China (ChinaCom'08)
• Conference Reviewer (Area 2: Software Engineering and Others)
  • The ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'06, '08, '10)
  • The ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'10)
  • The ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'10)
  • The IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'07)
  • The IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE'04, '05, '06, '08, '09)
  • The International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'05, '06, '09)
  • The International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'04, '07)
  • The Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'05, '06, '07)
  • The Asia-Pacific Web Conference (APWEB'05)
  • The International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC'05)
  • The Joint Conference on Information Sciences (JCIS'07)
  • The High Assurance Systems Engineering Conference (HASE'05, '07, '08)
  • The Pacific Rim Dependable Computing Conference (PRDC'07, '08)
  • The IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS'07)
  • The International Service Availability Symposium (ISAS'06, '07)
  • The International Workshop on Proactive Failure Avoidance, Recovery and Maintenance (PFARM'09, '10)
  • The International Workshop on Random Testing (RT'06)
  • The International Workshop on Evaluation and Evolution of Component Composition (EECC'06)
  • The International Workshop on Assurance in Distributed Systems and Networks (ADSN'06)

• CSC3120, Compilor Construction, Tutor in 2nd term, 2008-2009.
• CSC1520, Computer Principles and C++ Programing, Tutor in 1st term, 2008-2009.
• CSC1510, Computer Principles and C Programing, Tutor in 1st term, 2008-2009.
• CSC3100, Software Engineering, Tutor in 2nd term, 2006-2007 and 2nd term, 2007-2008.
• CSC5340, Advanced Topics in Distributed Software Systems, Tutor in 1st term, 2007-2008.
• CSC3130, Formal languages and Automata Theory, Tutor in 1st term, 2006-2007.

I was born and raised in Lufeng (Chinese: 陆丰), China. Something interesting about Lufeng is that it officially includes a 1681-square-km mainland-region and the Dongsha Islands (Pratas Islands). The mainland area where I was born is administered by Guangdong Province, but the Islands are administered by the Taiwan Government.

My mother is Hoklo people (Chinese: 鹤佬人) and my father is from Teochew (Chinese: 潮州). As a result, I'm a native speaker of Southern Min language (Chinese: 闽南语). My "strange" accent was developed from Hoklo dialect (Chinese: 鹤佬话) and Teochew dialect (Chinese: 潮州话). And I can probably understand the languages spoken by Chinese people from Eastern Guangdong, Southern Fujian, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Besides Southern Min language, I also speak Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese fluently, both of which were learnt when I was a young boy. But I seldom spoke Cantonese until I came to Hong Kong where most people speak Cantonese here. I can also understand a little bit Hakka language and Wu language which I am currently learning. I can read both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

I like traditional Chinese culture. I am an apprentice of Ancient Literary Chinese (Classic Chinese). From time to time I love to read Analects of Confucius written in Ancient Literary Chinese. I am trying to make myself a confucian follower. Again, I am just an apprentice, and Confucianism is not a religion by the way :).