TITLE:

Putting Wireless Sensing to the Litmus Test

ABSTRACT:

TWireless radios have been conventionally used as a communication platform for many years. However, communication is not the only utility of wireless signals. As signals traverse our environment, they “pick-up” information about the environment; this enables wireless sensing. If we observe the mutations the signals undergo, we can start to decode this additional information and learn more about our environment.

In this talk, I will discuss in detail how wireless sensing can enable liquid identification — a literal litmus test. Fine grained analysis of the signal helps us differentiate between a wide variety of liquids including, Pepsi and Coke, or distilled water and tap water. This has applications in airport security, detecting water adulteration in developing countries, quality assurance in the food industry, etc. Our liquid identification techniques are not an outcome of data based training or feature engineering. Instead, we measure two fundamental properties of the liquid that lead to its identification. I will also talk about my wireless motion tracking research, where I look at localization of people and objects in indoor spaces, on sports arenas, or in a battlefield.

BIO:
Ashutosh Dhekne is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are in the areas of wireless networking and mobile computing with applications to RF sensing, 5G cellular networks, and cyber physical systems. He is a winner of the Richard T. Cheng Endowed Fellowship (2014-15).