Yijia Gu

Education

• BS, Zhejiang University - China

About Yijia

• Hometown: Luquan, China
• Field of Study: Formal Methods
• PhD Advisor: Thomas Wahl

Biography

Yijia Gu is a PhD student in the Formal Methods program at Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences, advised by Professor Thomas Wahl. Yijia’s research focuses on verifying numerical programs to ensure that devices and programs are performing properly and effectively, and aims to form his own verification and development techniques to help future developers. Before joining the PhD program at Northeastern, Yijia earned a bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University in China.

What are your research interests?

My research is mainly about verification of numerical programs. Contrary to popular belief that these programs are only used by scientists or engineers, they actually appear more often now in our daily life. Take embedded devices, for example, which usually have a numerical control part that interacts with the physical world. It is very important to verify that the devices perform their functions to do what we expect them to do.

What’s one problem you’d like to solve with your research/work?

My research goal is to develop techniques that would help developers determine whether or not their numerical programs have portability issues under uncertain computing environments.

What aspect of what you do is most interesting?

The most interesting aspect of my research (also the most difficult part) is finding out that we need to approximate the infinite nature of many math processes by the finite nature of the computers because they can only do a finite number of operations in a limited amount of time.