MENU Z. Morley Mao Receives Google Faculty Research Award
Mao’s goal was to create a diagnosis tool to achieve responsive and energy-efficient mobile apps that work well in diverse network conditions.
EnlargeAssociate Professor Z. Morley Mao has been awarded a 2015 Google Faculty Research Award for her work entitled, “Enabling Cross-layer Visibility for Mobile Apps: Performance and Energy Efficiency Diagnosis.”
The performance characteristics and energy efficiency properties of today’s mobile apps depend on a variety of factors such as network conditions, device resources, and server response times. Mao’s goal was to create a diagnosis tool to achieve responsive and energy-efficient mobile apps that work well in diverse network conditions.
She states, “It is particularly challenging to discover the critical path of a user-triggered network operation for a mobile app due to the opaqueness of the cross-layer interaction across the layers in the network OSI stack, e.g., between the RLC and the TCP layers.”
She created a tool called XLayer, which enables cross-layer visibility to identify the performance bottleneck and expose the impact of network properties on app-level QoE. XLayer can help improve an app’s design, network stack, or other OS components.
Prof. Mao received her BS degree in electrical engineering and computer science and her MS and PhD degrees in computer science from UC-Berkeley in 2003. Since coming to Michigan in 2004, she has focused her teaching and research on computer networking, including wide area networks, distributed systems, and issues related to network security and Internet routing.
Her work involves both empirical data collection and analysis, as well as the design and implementation of new systems. She has taught Programming and Data Structures (EECS 280), Intro to Computer Security (EECS 388), Computer Networks (EECS 489), Advanced Computer Networks (EECS 589), Distributed Systems (EECS 591), and Advanced Topics in Computer Networks (EECS 589-4).
About the Google Faculty Research Award
The Google Faculty Research Awards program is a competitive worldwide program intended to facilitate more interaction between Google and academia. The intent of the awards program is to support academic research that is aligned with Google’s mission. The awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world.