Pamela Zave (born 1948) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

now working at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

. She is known for her work on

requirements engineering Requirements engineering (RE) is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements in the engineering design process. It is a common role in systems engineering and software engineering. The first use of the term ''requiremen ...

telecommunication services Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

, and protocol modeling and verification and is now working on network architecture.Professional Biography
retrieved 2018-10-15. She was named a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

in 2001 and was the 2017 recipient of the Harlan D. Mills Award from the

IEEE Computer Society IEEE Computer Society (commonly known as the Computer Society or CS) is a technical society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) dedicated to computing, namely the major areas of hardware, software, standards and people ...

Education and career

Zave graduated from

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in English. She earned her doctorate in computer science from the

University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...

in 1976 under the name Pamela Zave Smith; her thesis, "Functional equivalence of parallel processes", was supervised by Donald R. Fitzwater. She taught at the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...

from 1975 to 1981 and then joined

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

(which was then part of AT&T). She remained in the AT&T part of the Labs through the two corporate splits that formed

Bellcore iconectiv supplies communications providers with network planning and management services. The company’s cloud-based information as a service network and operations management and numbering solutions span trusted communications, digital identi ...

in 1984 and

Lucent Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies busines ...

in 1996 and continued working at

AT&T Labs Research AT&T Labs, Inc. (formerly AT&T Laboratories, Inc.) is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster, New Jersey; Middletown, New Jersey; ...

through 2017. Since then she has been a research associate at

Awards and honors

In 2017 Zave received the Harlan D. Mills Award from the

"for groundbreaking use of formal methods in the development of telecommunication software and for enduring contributions to software engineering theory." In 2001 Zave was named a

of the

"for encouraging the use of formal methods in the development of telecommunication software through influential research, tool development, large case studies, and professional education." She was also selected as an AT&T Fellow in 2009.

Research on requirements engineering

In collaboration with Michael A. Jackson, Zave created the set of definitions and reasoning obligations that have become known as the standard model for requirements engineering. The model is most fully explained in the paper "Four dark corners of requirements engineering." Earlier papers on this work won the Ten-Year Most Influential Paper Award from three conferences: 11th International Requirements Engineering Symposium (2003), 27th International Conference on Software Engineering (2005),. and 18th IEEE Conference on Requirements Engineering (2010).

Research on telecommunication services

Distributed Feature Composition (DFC) is a modular architecture for telecommunication services, designed to provide structured feature composition and easy management of feature interactions. DFC was invented by Zave and Michael Jackson beginning in 1997. An implementation of DFC was used to build the features for CallVantage (SM), AT&T's first voice-over-IP service, which became publicly available in 2004 and served approximately 100,000 customers world-wide. After CallVantage the DFC implementation was used to build a teleconferencing system used internally by AT&T, which for some time supported millions of user minutes each work day. DFC has also been incorporated into the Java Community Process standard for SIP Servlet containers. Zave holds 30 patents in the telecommunications area. Her papers on telecommunications research have won three Best Paper Awards: ''IEEE Software'' best paper of 1989 for "A compositional approach to multiparadigm programming", 7th International Workshop on Feature Interactions in Telecommunications and Software Systems (2003), and 3rd International Conference on Principles, Systems and Applications of IP Telecommunications (2009).

Research on protocol modeling and verification

Zave's work on finding bugs in the Chord protocol and proving a modified version correct has been credited by engineers in Amazon Web Services for convincing them to start using formal methods on real distributed systems.

Personal

In 2014 Zave married her partner, the Cuban-American artist Yolanda V. Fundora.Interests Outside Work
retrieved 2018-10-15. She is a

quilter Quilting is the process of joining a minimum of three layers of textile, fabric together either through stitching manually using a Sewing needle, needle and yarn, thread, or mechanically with a sewing machine or specialised longarm quilting ...

References

External links

Research Home Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zave, Pamela 1948 births Living people American computer scientists Cornell University alumni 2001 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery American LGBTQ scientists Lesbian scientists University of Maryland, College Park faculty University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni American women computer scientists 21st-century American women scientists 20th-century American LGBTQ people 21st-century American LGBTQ people