This Is What Science Looks Like at NC State: Xiaohui Gu

Editor’s note: This post was written by Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, an associate professor of computer science at NC State. The post is an entry in an ongoing series that we hope will highlight the diversity of researchers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The series is inspired by the This Is What A Scientist Looks Like site.

My name is Xiaohui (Helen) Gu and I am an associate professor in the computer science department at NC State University. I lead the Distributed Systems Research Group (the DANCE research lab). Distributed systems have become the fundamental computing infrastructures for many important real world systems such as computing clouds, data centers, Internet search engine, and big data processing. My research group conducts fundamental research in distributed systems with focuses on automatic management of complex distributed systems, data-intensive computing, and distributed system reliability.

I enjoy swimming, cooking, traveling, and dancing. Distributed system research resembles dancing in many ways. Both are fun but challenging; both require a lot of coordinated thinking but are also super-rewarding!