Yuriy Brun

After spending 2009-2012 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Yuriy Brun joined the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an assistant professor in 2012.

Brun's research focuses on making it easier to build and deploy software systems, and ensuring that they abide by desirable behavioral constraints. His research is centered around automation and software behavior. He develops techniques that automatically enforce behavior on systems, automatically mine behavioral models of software to help developers understand system behavior, and automatically repair systems to satisfy the behavioral requirements imposed on them. He works closely with developers to understand the challenges they face and to build tools to help them. He works closely with systems to understand where they go wrong and how to automate preventing that from happening. The long-term goal of this research is self-adaptive systems that self-monitor, self-manage, and self-correct their own behavior to achieve high-level goals in dynamic, constrained environments. Focusing on software fairness, Brun has developed automated techniques to test software, particularly software that uses machine learning or other data mining methods, for bias, and to help enforce fairness constraints during the learning process.

Brun's research is multidisciplinary, often combining advances in distributed systems, information theory, theoretical computer science, security, and machine learning. The research is highly collaborative and involves open-source development.

Brun received the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2015, the SEAMS Most Influential (test of time) Paper Award in 2020, the IEEE TCSC Young Achiever in Scalable Computing Award in 2013, three ACM SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Awards in 2011, 2017, and 2019, a Best Paper Award in 2017, a Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation Award in 2014, a Google Faculty Research Award in 2015, a Lilly Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 2017, a College Outstanding Teacher Award in 2017, and two Distinguished Reviewer Awards. He is a Distinguished Member of the ACM. His work on privacy in cloud computing was a finalist in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Competition in 2008. Brun regularly serves on program committees of premier conferences on software engineering. One of his passions is promoting science and technology to young and underrepresented future scientists; he serves as a judge at middle- and high-school science fairs and mentors undergraduates in research and in pursuing graduate careers.