| Intro | American computer scientist |
| Is | Computer scientist |
| From | United States of America |
| Type |
Technology Science |
| Gender | female |
| Birth | 1948 |
| Age: | 72 years |
Pamela Zave (born 1948,) is an American computer scientist who works at AT&T Labs, where she is known for her work in requirements engineering and her use of formal methods in telecommunications.
Education and career
Zave graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in English, in 1970. Already at that time she showed an interest in computer science, taking a summer computer programming job with J. C. Penney in 1969. She earned her doctorate in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison 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 from 1976 to 1981, and then joined Bell Labs. She remained in the AT&T part of the labs through the two corporate splits that formed Bellcore in 1984 and Lucent in 1996, and ended up working at AT&T Labs, where she is currently a technology advisor in the Network Services Research Laboratory.
She was elected as the secretary-treasurer of SIGSOFT for 1983–1985 and as vice-chair for 1985–1987. She was program chair of the Second IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering in 1996, and co-chair of the Tenth International Formal Methods Europe Symposium in 2001. In 2009 she gave a keynote address at the International Conference on Software Engineering and in 2011 she gave a keynote address at the 9th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference
on Software Architecture.
Selected publications
With Bashar Nuseibeh, Zave is the editor of the book Software requirements and design: the work of Michael Jackson (Good Friends Publishing, 2010), about computer scientist Michael A. Jackson with whom Zave developed the “distributed feature composition” specification architecture for telecommunications services.
Three of Zave’s publications have received “most influential” awards, given many years after they were published. Her paper “Domain descriptions” (with Jackson at the 1993 IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, doi:10.1109/ISRE.1993.324836) was honored in 2003 as the most influential paper from that symposium. A second paper with Jackson, “Deriving specifications from requirements: An example” (17th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1995, doi:10.1145/225014.225016), was again named most influential in 2005. And her paper “A reference model for requirements and specifications” (with Gunter, Gunter, and Jackson, International Requirements Engineering Conference 2000) was named most influential in 2010.
Her paper “A compositional approach to multiparadigm programming” (IEEE Software, 1989, doi:10.1109/52.35586) won the best paper of the year award from that journal. Another paper, “Ideal address translation: Principles, properties, and applications” (Seventh International Workshop on Feature Interactions in Telecommunications and Software Systems, 2003), won the L.G. (Wiet) Bouma Best Paper Award at that workshop.
Awards and honors
In 2002 Zave was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery “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.
Personal
Zave’s brother, Derek A. Zave (1946–1987) was also a computer scientist.
Zave is openly lesbian; her fiancée and long-term partner is Cuban-American artist Yolanda V. Fundora. Zave is also an avid quilter.