Xia Zhou Receives NSF CAREER Award

CS Professor Xia Zhou has received an NSF CAREER Award. The NSF Program “offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.”

Xia’s research focuses on turning the ubiquitous light around us into a powerful, accurate behavioral sensor that can track what we do and how we behave. Leading a team at the DartNets Lab, Xia has proposed the first-of-its-kind human sensing system using purely the light emitted from the ceiling LED lights, without requiring any on-body devices nor cameras and brining no electromagnetic inference. The team first presented the work in ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) 2015 and won the Best Video Award. More recently, they improved their system by addressing several key practical challenges such as sensor deployment overhead, furniture blockage, and user mobility. Their new work will appear in ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys) in the upcoming June. Xia and her team’s work on visible light communication systems has also won serval other awards including the Best Paper Award in VLCS’14 and the Best Demo Award in MobiSys’15.

Congratulations Xia!