Frances Foong Yao is professor and head of the department of computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at the City University of Hong Kong

City University of Hong Kong

City University of Hong Kong is a comprehensive research university in Hong Kong. It was founded in 1984 as City Polytechnic of Hong Kong and became a fully accredited university in 1994. It has achieved fast growth in recent years and received international recognition for its academic achievements...

.

After receiving a B.S. in mathematics from National Taiwan University

National Taiwan University

National Taiwan University is a national co-educational university located in Taipei, Republic of China . In Taiwan, it is colloquially known as "Táidà" . Its main campus is set upon 1,086,167 square meters in Taipei's Da'an District. In addition, the university has 6 other campuses in Taiwan,...

 in 1969, Yao did her Ph.D. studies under the supervision of Michael J. Fischer

Michael J. Fischer

Michael John Fischer is a computer scientist who works in the fields of distributed computing, parallel computing, cryptography, algorithms and data structures, and computational complexity.-Career:...

 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, receiving her Ph.D. in 1973. She then held positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

, Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

, and Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, before joining the staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 where she stayed until her retirement in 1999. In 2003, she came out of retirement to take her present position at City University. She is a Fellow

Fellow

A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...

 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

American Association for the Advancement of Science

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...

; in 1991, she and Ronald Graham

Ronald Graham

Ronald Lewis Graham is a mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as being "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years"...

 won the Lester R. Ford Award

L. R. Ford

Lester Randolph Ford, Sr. was an American mathematician, editor of the American Mathematical Monthly from 1942 to 1946, and President of the Mathematical Association of America from 1947 to 1948....

 of the Mathematical Association of America

Mathematical Association of America

The Mathematical Association of America is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure and applied mathematicians; computer scientists;...

 for their expository article, A Whirlwind Tour of Computational Geometry. Yao's husband, Andrew Yao

Andrew Yao

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a prominent computer scientist and computational theorist. Yao used the minimax theorem to prove what is now known as Yao's Principle.Yao was born in Shanghai, China...

, is also a well-known theoretical computer scientist and Turing Award

Turing Award

The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...

 winner. Yao's Erdős number

Erdos number

The Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.The same principle has been proposed for other eminent persons in other fields.- Overview :...

 is 1.

Much of Yao's research has been in the subject of computational geometry

Computational geometry

Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational...

 and combinatorial algorithms; she is known for her work with Mike Paterson

Mike Paterson

Michael Stewart "Mike" Paterson, is the director of the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and was chair of that department in 2005....

 on binary space partitioning

Binary space partitioning

In computer science, binary space partitioning is a method for recursively subdividing a space into convex sets by hyperplanes. This subdivision gives rise to a representation of the scene by means of a tree data structure known as a BSP tree.Originally, this approach was proposed in 3D computer...

, her work with Dan Greene on finite-resolution computational geometry, and her work with Alan Demers and Scott Shenker

Scott Shenker

Scott Shenker is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He is also the head of the Networking Group and the Vice President of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. He received his Sc.B. in Physics from Brown University in 1978, and his PhD in Physics from...

 on scheduling algorithms for energy-efficient power management

Power management

Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power state when inactive. In computing this is known as PC power management and is built...

. More recently she has been working in cryptography

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

: with her husband Andrew Yao and Wang Xiaoyun she found new attacks on the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function.

External links

• Frances Yao's publications at DBLP.