Friday, March 29, 2024
Practical Mobile Sensing at Scale
Pengfei Zhou, Assistant Professor, Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, School of Computing and Information
(in cooperation with the Telecommunications Seminar)
1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Room 411 IS Building, 135 North Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Abstract: Enabling large-scale sensing with mobile devices is crucial for various human-centered applications. However, in practice, environmental dynamics and the lack of well-curated sensor data make achieving large-scale accurate sensing across different scenarios extremely challenging. In this presentation, I will discuss our recent research progress on addressing these challenges using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors on mobile devices. Specifically, I will introduce a foundational model designed to facilitate various large-scale sensing models using advanced self-supervised techniques inspired by BERT. I will then delve into our proposed universal Human Activity Recognition (HAR) framework, which aims to tackle data heterogeneity in real-world scenarios. Our approach involves augmenting data with the physics of the IMU sensing process and employing novel data augmentation techniques to leverage both unlabeled and labeled data effectively. Through extensive experiments across four open datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of our approach in adapting HAR models to diverse environments.

Bio: Pengfei Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining Pitt, he was a Research Scientist at Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC), Illinois at Singapore, a Research Fellow at Alibaba-NTU Joint Research Institute (JRI) and a Technical Advisor for Alibaba Group. He founded fayfans Co., Ltd developing AIoT products in 2016. He received his B.E. degree in the Department of Automation from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. degree in the School of Computer Science and Engineering from Nanyang Technological University.