Location, Location, Location

When: Friday, October 16, 2015
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Rong Zheng, McMaster University, Canada

Host: Prof. Jaspal Subhlok

Location-based services (LBS) have experienced substantial growth in the last decade with the proliferation of smart devices. Service providers can benefit from users’ location information in facilitating precision advertising, personalized recommendation, resource tracking and proximity notification, etc. However, despite the fact that people spend majority of their time indoor, indoor positioning systems (IPS) only have limited success due to low accuracy. In this talk, we present our on-going efforts on several related problems in LBS: 1) pedestrian dead reckoning with the assistance of unmodified light, 2) map generation, and 3) environment change detection via mobile participatory sensing. Finally, we summarize our experiences in designing and developing as well as post-release lessons with a navigation app for McMaster campus.

Bio:

Rong Zheng (S'03-M'04-SM'10) received her Ph.D. degree from Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned her M.E. and B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, P.R. China. She was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science, University of Houston from 2004 to 2012. Rong Zheng was a visiting Associate Professor in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University from Aug. 2011 to Jan. 2012; and a visiting Research Scientist in Microsoft Research, Redmond with the Sensing and Energy Research Group between Feb. 2012 and May 2012. She is now a tenured Associate Professor in the Dept. of Computing and Software, an associate member of the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engr., and a member of the School of Computational Science and Engineering in McMaster University, Canada. Rong Zheng is a Joseph Ip Distinguished Engineering Fellow from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2018.

Rong Zheng's research interests include Cyber Physical Systems, mobile computing and networked systems. She received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006. She serves on the technical program committees of leading networking conferences including INFOCOM, ICDCS, ICNP, etc. She is an editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and has served as a guest editor for EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, Special issue on wireless location estimation and tracking, Elsevlers Computer Communications – Special Issue on Cyber Physical Systems; and Program co-chair of WASA'12, CPSCom'12, MobileHealth'14.