Yasamin Mostofi's Homepage

Yasamin Mostofi

Professor, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Affiliate, Department of Computer Science
University of California, Santa Barbara

Office: Harold Frank Hall 5121
Email: ymostofi [at] ece [dot] ucsb [dot] edu
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Openings: for Ph.D. students/postocs interested in innovative research in systems-related areas such as communications/signal processing, vision, robotics/control, and machine learning.

About me: I received my Ph.D. from Stanford University. My background is multi-disciplinary, encompassing wireless systems and robotics/control. I am honored to have received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in the White House, the Antonio Ruberti Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, and the IEEE Outstanding Engineer Award of Region 6 (more than 10 Western U.S. states), among others. I am a fellow of IEEE. Due to my multi-disciplinary background, I am fortunate to have been an active member of a number of communities in both IEEE and ACM. See Short Bio for more details.

Research interests: My lab uses a broad toolset from wireless systems, signal processing, control/robotics, optimization theory, vision, machine learning, and stochastic analysis. Our work is then rooted in developing new mathematical models and non-conventional design principles in the two areas of wireless systems and autonomous agents. Several of our work also involve extensive experimentation. Two broad current research directions are:

Non-conventional use of wireless systems for smart sensing and learning, sensing with Radio Frequency signals (e.g., with WiFi, mmWave, 6G cellular, etc), new mathematical models for RF sensing, Machine Learning (ML) for RF sensing, synthetic data generation for ML-based RF sensing systems using vision data, joint sensing and communication

Robot-assisted connectivity, joint communication and robotic path planning, networked robotics, unmanned vehicles for 5G/6G cellular systems, human-robot collaborations, robot learning and perception

In the area of RF sensing, in 2010, my lab showed it possible to sense with everyday WiFi signals by successfully imaging still objects with WiFi. This area has grown tremendously since then and my lab has been a key contributor, enabling several new applications with WiFi signals, such as occupancy analytic, smart health, person/activity recognition, and detailed imaging. In 2008, my lab introduced the term Communication-Aware Motion Planning to carve a new area at the intersection of robotics and communications for enabling new forms of connectivity with unmanned vehicles. The area of robot-assisted connectivity has grown tremendously since then, with exciting potentials for the next generation cellular systems, and my lab is proud to be a key contributor.

See below for more details on current research thrusts:

WiFi for imaging, WiFi reading through walls, edge tracing with RF, drones imaging through walls, localization/tracking [sample paper on WiFi reading through walls] [sample video/paper on drones imaging through walls][all RF sensing papers][sample data]

Crowd analytic with WiFi [sample video/project page/paper], synthetic RF data generation from vision data [sample paper], person identification with WiFi [sample video/project page/paper], activity recognition [sample paper], seizure detection [paper], [all RF sensing papers]

Mobility-assisted connectivity, communication-aware robotics, UAVs for next generation cellular, multi-agent systems [sample review article in Annual Reviews][all related papers][sample data]

Human-robot collaboration, human visual performance prediction, when to query human [sample paper on exploiting object similarity in robotics][project page on predicting human visual performance][related papers][data]

Sample Recent News:

Dec. 2023: Honored our RF imaging work became UCSB's most viewed 2023 news [link].

Oct. 2023: New paradigm in RF field programming, using edge elements and diffraction. Check out our MobiCom 2023 paper [pdf].

Oct. 2023: Check out our IMWUT paper on WiFi detecting non-intentional actions such as body reflexes [pdf].

In the News (Sept-Oct. 2023): our new work enabling WiFi to image/read the English alphabet through walls: BBC, New Scientist, TechRadar, TechXplore, Tom's Hardware, ACM TechNews, UCSB Current, and other outlets. [video] [project page] [MobiCom 2022 paper]

June 2023: Honored to give a keynote at 24th IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile & Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM).

May 2023: Honored to give an invited talk at IEEE ICRA workshop ``Communication challenges in multi-robot systems''.

Sept. 2022: MobiCom 2022 is in October. It has been great being part of its journey as a Program Co-Chair. Hope to see everyone there.

May 2022: Honored to serve on SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time award committee.

Nov. 2021: Congrats to Dr. Belal Korany for successfully defending his Ph.D. and joining Qualcomm.

In the News (Sept. 2021): Our MobiSys paper on WiFi counting a seated crowd, using their natural body fidgets, in the news!The paper shows how this problem resembles an old queuing theory problem. BBC Digital Planet (minute 14),ABC Australia (minute 10), Gizmodo, ACM TechNews, TechXplore, UCSB Current, and other outlets. [video] [project page] [MobiSys paper]

2021:Check out our invited paper in Annual Reviews that reviews the area of communication-aware robotics.

March 2021: Robust nocturnal seizure detection with WiFi. Check out our paper for a new mathematical modeling of received signal bandwidth during seizure that enables this.

Jan. 2021: Mostofi serves as program co-chair for MobiCom 2022.

Dec. 2020: Congrats to Dr. Chitra Karanam for successfully defending her Ph.D. and joining Nuro.

Dec. 2020: Training RF sensing systems with zero RF training data is possible. Check out our paper in ACM IMWUT to see how to use available online videos and translate videos to synthetic RF data for training.

Nov. 2020: Mostofi gives invited talk at UIUC.

Oct. 2020: Mostofi gives invited talk at Boston University.

Sept. 2020: Congrats to Dr. Herbert Cai for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis and joining Qualcomm.

July 2020:Check out our new paper on Exploiting Object Similarity in Robotic Operations, IEEE TRO.

Jan. 2020: Mostofi is honored to become an IEEE fellow.

July 2020:New Mathematical Model of Robotic Distance Traveled Till Connectivity. Check out paper in Autonomous Robots.

In the News (Oct. 2019): First Demonstration of Through-Wall Person Identification from Video Footage in the News: BBC Digital Planet, Yahoo Finance, CNET Japan, Digital Trends, Science Daily, ACM News, New Atlas, IEEE Engineering360, Tech Xplore, UCSB Current, and other outlets [video][project page][paper]

June 2019: Mostofi gives invited talk at UCI.

April 2019: Mostofi gives invited talk at UCLA.

Dec. 2018: Mostofi is honored to be a semi-plenary speaker at the 57th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) .

Dec. 2018: Congrats to Dr. Saandeep Depatla for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis and joining Uber.

In the News (Sept. 2018): First Demonstration of Through-Wall Crowd Counting with Only WiFi in the News: Tech Crunch, Digit, New Atlas, The Register, Science Daily, UCSB Current, and other outlets [video][project page][paper]

Sept. 2018: Congrats to Dr. Arjun Muralidharan for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis and joining Google.

June 2018: Mostofi is honored to be a keynote speaker at the 26th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED).

June 2018: Check out our new paper on Crowd Speed Estimation and Counting with WiFi, IEEE Secon 2018.

April 2018: Angle-of-Arrival Estimation with Only Signal Magnitude is possible. Check out our paper in IPSN 2018.

March 2018: Congrats to Chitra for receiving the CCDC Fellowship, and to Arjun and Herbert for receiving the ECE Thesis Fellowship.

Dec. 2017: Check out our new paper on Crowd Counting Through Walls, IEEE PerCom 2018.

Dec. 2017: Check out Paper Repository on Human-Robot Collaborations.

Dec. 2017: Congrats to Belal Salama for successfully defending his Ph.D. oral exam.

Nov. 2017: Mostofi honored to give UCSB Library Fall Public Talk.

Nov. 2017: Mostofi honored to talk at UCSB Parents and Family Weekend.

October 2017: Mostofi gives invited talk at HotWireless.

September 2017: Check out our new paper on Distributed Robotic Beam Forming, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.

In the News (June 2017): First Demonstration of 3D Imaging Through Walls with WiFi and Drones (X-Ray Eyes in Sky) in the News: BBC Interview, Engadget, TechCrunch, Mashable, TechRadar, Sputnik News, New York Post, PC Mag, Digital Trends, IFLScience, World News, Science Daily, Tecmundo, The Register, Phys.org, New Atlas, UCSB press release, IEEE Spectrum, ACM News, Yahoo News, MSN News, and other outlets [video][project page][paper]

June 2017: Mostofi gives invited talk at IEEE Secon Workshop on Robotic Wireless Networks.

April 2017: Mostofi gives invited talk at SoCal Robotics.

March 2017: Mostofi gives invited talk at Panel on Future of WiFi, IEEE WCNC.

Dec. 2016: Mostofi awarded the 2016 Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize by IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), for "contributions to the fundamentals of communications and control co-optimization in mobile sensor networks". Check out the UCSB News Release, the ECE News Release, and Award ceremony photo

Oct. 2016: Mostofi gives invited talk at CMU.

Jun. 2016: Our paper on predicting human visual performance in visual tasks and incorporating it in robotic sensing and path planning in Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2016 [project page].

May 2016: Mostofi gives invited talk at Stanford.

April 2016: Mostofi gives invited talk at USC.

January 2016: Mostofi gives invited talk at UC-Riverside.

Apr. 2015: video on counting people with only WiFi in the news [project page][paper].


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Due to my multi-disciplinary background, I am very fortune that I can call a number of communities home. As such, I have served in several different capacities in both IEEE and ACM over the years. Here are some sample recent ones:

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