Professor Yu’s research interests lie in the areas of information systems analysis and design, software requirements engineering, knowledge management, and in particular the modelling of technology systems and their social contexts. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 research papers and several books. His article “Towards Modelling and Reasoning Support for Early-Phase Requirements Engineering” in Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Int. Symposium on Requirements Engineering (1997) received the Most Influential Paper Award at the 2007 Requirements Engineering Conference.

His doctoral dissertation, which introduced the ‘i*’ framework for modeling and analyzing strategic actor relationships was published in Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering (MIT Press, 2011). That volume includes eighteen chapters authored by researchers from around the world who have applied, adapted, or extended the i* framework in various ways, and for diverse application contexts, ranging from business processes to knowledge management to air traffic control and from information security to software development. The i* framework is the basis for GRL, the Goal-oriented Requirements Language, which together with the scenario-modeling notation UCM, constitute the international standard ITU-T Z.151.