1. Research

Research Focus

1. IoT sensing systems and applications a. Powerline radiation sensing The periodic electric and magnetic fields emitted by the service power cables distributed in civil infrastructures provide both time and location information. Our research exploits these fields to develop clock synchronization, natural timestamping, localization, and device authentication services for indoor and wearable IoT objects. b. LoRa radio sensing LoRa is a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technology that can interconnect IoT objects distributed in large geographic areas or deep indoor/underground structures.

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Secure sensing in AIoT

Main contributors from the group: Qun Song (topic coordinator), Zhenyu Yan Image modified from this, credit goes to the source. Also refer to this paper for background By 2025, it is estimated that there will be more than 41.6 billion networked IoT devices. These IoT devices generate 79.4 zettabyes data yearly, which is almost twice of today’s whole Internet (44 zettabytes). Transmitting such massive IoT data to the clouds for centralized processing will face communication bandwidth bottleneck.

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Privacy-preserving sensing in AIoT

Main contributors from the group: Linshan Jiang (topic coordinator), Chaojie Gu, Mengyao Zheng (alumnus), Dixing Xu (alumnus) Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning in IoT As explained in our post, a hybrid computing paradigm consisting of edge computing at the front end and cloud computing at the back end will prevail along with the formation of IoT as a global infrastructure. In addition, the deep neural network-based learning and inference will be important for improving the sensing performance of IoT systems.

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Powerline radiation sensing

Main contributors from the group: Zhenyu Yan(topic coordinator), Qun Song, Rongrong Wang, Xu Liu, Linshan Jiang Electric power distribution networks penetrate into all civil infrastructures. The service powerlines emit both electric fields and magnetic fields. The electric fields are induced by the voltages of the powerlines, and the magnetic fields are induced by the currents going through the powerlines. Because the power networks provide alternating currents at a nominal frequency (e.

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LoRa radio sensing

Main contributors from the group: Chaojie Gu (topic coordinator), Linshan Jiang, Dongfang Guo Low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) form an important class of wireless networks for many geographically distributed Internet-of-Things (IoT) objects. LPWANs form a new pole in the spectrum of power consumption versus communication ranges, as shown in the figure below. LPWANs’ long-range communication capabilities will increase the degree of connectivity of IoT and enable deep penetration of networked intelligence into urban territories (e.

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Building sensing

Main contributors from the group: Duc Van Le (topic coordinator), Rongrong Wang, Yingbo Liu (alumnus) We study the problems of sensing the environment conditions in a building and controlling various actuators to reduce the building’s energy consumption and maintain certain environmental condition levels when the load (e.g., IT equipment, human occupants) of the building varies over time. Dr. Rui Tan has early research works on residential power disaggregation by deploying wireless sensors in a nearly ad hoc way [1, 2], temperature field prediction [3] and cooling control [4] in computer rooms.

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Acoustic and imagery sensing

Main contributors from the group: Wenjie Luo (topic coordinator), Qun Song, Chaojie Gu, Zhenyu Yan, Duc Van Le, Siyuan Zhou, Jiale Chen, Qiping (Joy) Yang The acoustic and imagery sensing modalities provide abundant information about the sensed target. As a result, the volume of an acoustic/imagery signal sample is often high and the data processing to extract useful information requires intensive computing. Such characteristics introduce various system challenges in data acquisition, computing, storage, and network transmission on networked sensing platforms with constrained processing capabilities, network bandwidth, and bounded energy supply.

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