Title: Tracking & Predicting Mobility for Smart Campus Services

Abstract

A variety of technologies, including WiFi-based localization and camera-based people tracking, are making it practical to collect fine-grained longitudinal traces of human movement in indoor public spaces. This talk will describe the experience of collecting and using such traces on the SMU campus via LiveLabs, a multi-year mobile systems research effort, to build various smart campus applications. I will specifically highlight applications that rely on predictive analytics of campus-wide movement behavior, at both individual and aggregated levels. A notable exemplar is the Tasker mobile crowdsourcing platform, which supports a Smart Campus by using the predicted movement patterns of campus residents to match users to location-specific reporting tasks. I shall then describe recent advances in predicting, sufficiently in advance, episodes where an individual’s movement behavior deviates from the normal—this is an important breakthrough with applications in smart building resource management. Finally, I shall provide an overview of my recently-initiated efforts in combining machine learning techniques with aggregated mobility prediction to optimize HVAC and lighting energy consumption in an upcoming 5-storey ZEB (Zero-Energy Building) at SMU.

Bio of the speaker

Bio: Archan Misra is Professor, and the Associate Dean of Research, in the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University (SMU). His current research interests lie in systems-oriented research in the areas of wearable & IoT sensing, real-time socio-physical urban analytics and mobile crowdsourcing. He is also the Director of SMU’s Center for Applied Smart-Nation Analytics (CASA), which assists public agencies in implementing advanced Smart Nation services in Singapore. Over a 20-year research career spanning both academics and industry (at IBM Research and Bellcore), Archan has worked extensively on problems spanning wireless networking, mobile & pervasive computing and urban sensing. Archan holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, and chaired the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) from 2005-2007.

Title: IoT from the Lab to the Real World

Abstract

The manufacturing industry is going through a digital transformation, from a pure device maker to a hybrid device+service provider. IoT promises to be the enabler for this transformation, connecting at one end the consumers and the other end the manufacturers and their vast resources. I will draw examples from Haier’s practices in smart home and connected factories. Building upon the IoT and other advanced computing technologies, Haier’s U+ Platform has driven the rapid iteration and introduction of new consumer experiences and drastically improved the manufacturing efficiency.

Bio of the speaker

Dr. Feng Zhao is Chief Technology Officer and Vice President at Haier, a world leader in consumer appliances and smart devices. He is responsible for Haier’s advanced R&D and smart home products and solutions. Under Dr. Zhao’s leadership, Haier has developed the world’s leading U+ Smart Home Platform, providing consumers with the best-in-class smart home devices, software and services. Together with Haier’s Connected Factory effort, Haier is leading the industry in the digital transform from a hardware-centric manufacturer to an Internet enabled platform.

Dr. Zhao is a leading authority on Internet of Things (IoT), having pioneered and developed some of the foundational technologies in IoT. Dr. Zhao was an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia during 2009-2015, responsible for hardware, mobile and sensing, software analytics, systems, and networking research areas. He and his team developed mobile and cloud solutions that advanced the state-of-the-art in computing and significantly impacted Microsoft product groups: accurate indoor navigation system, efficient Internet search index serving platform, interactive visual analytics for big data, software defined radio and data center networking technologies. Prior to joining MSR-Asia, Dr. Zhao was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond (2004-2009), and founded the Networked Embedded Computing Area. During this time, he led the team to develop the MSR sensor mote, Tiny Web Service, SenseWeb and SensorMap, Data Center Genome, JouleMeter, and GAMPS data compression. Dr. Zhao received his PhD in Computer Science from MIT, and taught at Stanford University and Ohio State University. He was a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC and founded PARC's research effort in sensor networks. He served as the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. Dr. Zhao is an IEEE Fellow, and received a Sloan Research Fellowship and NSF and ONR Young Investigator Awards. He has authored or co-authored over 100 technical papers and books and has over 40 US patents issued. His work has been featured in news media such as BBC World News, BusinessWeek, and Technology Review.