I‘m Yingao (Elaine) Yao, a CS PhD student at Cornell University advised by Saikat Dutta. I received my MASc in 2024 in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia (UBC), where I worked with Karthik Pattabiraman and Caroline Lemieux. I received my B.Eng in 2021 from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Before PhD, I worked at Fortinet as a Security Researcher.
My research interests are at the intersection of Software Engineering and Machine Learning (ML). I am particularly interested in developing software testing techniques (e.g., fuzzing) to improve the security, reliability, and correctness of ML systems.
Paper on NBTest, an automated assertion generation approach for ML notebooks got accepted to ASE 2026.
Paper on SwarmFuzz, a fuzzer for finding vulnerabilities in drone swarms got accepted to DSN 2023.
Poster on the drone swarm security accepted to ACM CCS 2022.