Mostofi & Korany – IEEE ComSoc Outstanding Paper Award

The IEEE Communications Society Outstanding Paper is a prestigious award given to one paper each year, from a large pool of IEEE Communications Society-related journals and transactions over the past three calendar years, and honors “the author(s) of an outstanding technical paper in the areas of interest and scope of ComSoc.”

Here's a summary Yasamin Mostofi and Belal Korany's paper — Epilepsy affects over 50 million individuals worldwide, making it one of the most common neurological disorders. Nocturnal (sleep-related) seizures, in particular, can be fatal if unnoticed. Existing detection methods using cameras or wearables can be invasive, may not provide the needed accuracy, or comfort, and can further be costly.

This paper introduces a new foundation that harnesses everyday WiFi signals for accurate, rapid, and noninvasive detection of nocturnal seizures. Consider a pair of WiFi transceivers near a person. The paper introduces a first-of-its-kind mathematical framework that rigorously relates the bandwidth of the received signal (easily measurable on WiFi cards) to the motion speeds of different body parts, laying the groundwork for a new class of RF-based health monitoring systems.  Interestingly, to formalize the underlying concepts, the paper draws analogy to and get inspired by a seemingly unrelated 1922 problem in Analog FM radio design.

Building on its mathematical foundation, the paper then addresses a major challenge in robustly detecting seizures, i.e., distinguishing them from many sleep events that can involve high-motion activities (e.g., restless leg syndrome, rapid movements, etc). Then by extensively researching the medical literature on normal sleep movements, seizures, and typical breathing patterns, the paper establishes bounds on body part speeds for these three classes of activities. These insights, when integrated with the earlier bandwidth derivations, enable the development of a bandwidth-based design space that can robustly distinguish seizures from normal sleep movements. The proposed foundation is then rigorously validated through extensive experimentation in seven different bedroom-type locations.

Mostofi's and Korany's Bios

Yasamin Mostofi received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. She is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. Yasamin is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, the Antonio Ruberti Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society (research contribution award for 40 and under), the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, the 2025 IEEE Communications Society Outstanding Paper Award, and the IEEE Outstanding Engineer Award of Region 6 (more than 10 Western U.S. states), among other awards. She is a fellow of IEEE. Sample keynotes include a semi-plenary talk at the 2018 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), a keynote at the 2018 Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED), and a keynote at the 2023 IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile & Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), among others.

Yasamin's research is multi-disciplinary, in the areas of wireless systems and robotics/control. Current high-level research thrusts include 1) RF sensing for several different applications such as through-wall imaging, occupancy analytics, collective behaviors, context inference, smart health, and smart spaces; and 2) communication-aware robotics, UAV-assisted connectivity, and joint robotic path planning and communication. Her research has appeared in several reputable news venues such as BBC, New Scientist, Daily Mail, Engadget, TechCrunch, NSF Science360, ACM News, and IEEE Spectrum, among others.

Yasamin has served in many leadership capacities including serving on the inaugural editorial board of Nature Partner Journals (NPJ) on Wireless Technology, serving as a Technical Program Co-Chair for ACM MobiCom 2022, serving on the Board of Governors for IEEE Control Systems Society, and serving as a Senior Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL OF NETWORK SYSTEMS, among others.

Belal Korany received the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2021, and the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Cairo University, Egypt, in 2012 and 2015, respectively. He currently serves as a senior R&D engineer at Qualcomm Inc., where he works on cutting-edge technologies enabling the next generation of cellular networks. His research interests include wireless communications and sensing, wireless networks, and signal processing. His Ph.D. research work at UCSB has appeared in several reputable news outlets.

• Paper info: Belal Korany and Yasamin Mostofi “Nocturnal Seizure Detection Using Off-the-Shelf WiFi,” IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 9, no. 9, pp. 6996-7008, May 2022
• Link to the Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.13556