Designing the Wireless Internet of Things with Ambient Awareness

Speaker:        Professor Xinyu Zhang
                Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
                University of Wisconsin-Madison

Title:          "Designing the Wireless Internet of Things with Ambient
                 Awareness"

Date:           Wednesday, 12 July 2017

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Room 1511 (via lifts 27/28), HKUST

Abstract:

The forthcoming decade will witness an explosion of Internet-of-Things
(IoT), which incorporates not only the current mobile devices, but also
smart everyday objects equipped with computation, communication and
sensing capabilities.  IoT will automate human life through a new wave of
applications, such as smart buildings, intelligent connected vehicles, 3D
user interfaces, and immersive telepresence.  But to reach its tipping
point, IoT still needs two critical foundations: (i) wireless network
architectures that can scale to billions of devices with wire-speed
connectivity; (ii) ubiquitous sensing mechanisms that enable the devices
to be aware of ambient locations and micro-activities.

In this talk, I will present a common design principle to build these
foundations. I will show that by designing proper computational models for
wireless signals, we can obtain precise information about how wireless
devices interact, with the environment and between themselves. The impacts
of such computational intelligence manifest through two aspects: (i)
Bridging the gap between the high theoretical capacity of wireless links
and the poor application quality that users experience. Examples include
scalable distributed MIMO and millimeter-wave networks with seamless
coverage.  (ii) Enabling ubiquitous sensing modalities that augment
commodity wireless devices or plain objects with ambient intelligence.
Examples include 3D orientation sensing of batteryless objects, decoding
sound signals through wall using WiFi, and building-scale localization of
smartphones at centimeter precision.  From a broader perspective, these
systems embody a fresh methodology to wireless systems research, which
transcends the boundaries between signal processing, networking, and
mobile computing.


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Biography:

Xinyu Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and will be
an Associate Professor at the University of California San Diego starting
from August 2017. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and
Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2012. His research interest
lies in wireless systems and ubiquitous computing, and more specifically
in (i) designing next-generation wireless architectures based on
millimeter-wave, large-scale distributed antennas, and physical-layer
informed protocols; (ii) designing wireless sensing systems to track
micro-locations and human interactions with objects.  His research work
has been regularly published in top conferences in these areas, especially
ACM MobiCom, MobiSys and IEEE INFOCOM. He is the recipient of ACM MobiCom
Best Paper Award (2011), NSF CAREER award (2014), Google Research Award
(2017), and was named a Dugald C. Jackson Faculty Scholar (2017). His
research has led to multiple tech transfers including two startup
companies.