Pittsburgh Experimental Research Group (PERG)

About Us

Welcome to the Pittsburgh Experimental Research Group (PERG)! Our team builds cutting-edge technologies in wireless communication, sensing systems, and mobile health applications. Our team is passionate about advancing the integration of wearable devices, health sensors, and wireless technologies for impactful real-world solutions.

Demo our earable health sensing systems at a village near Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Building collaborations with faculties and doctors from Gaston Berger University, Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Demo our earable health sensing systems at a village near Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Asclepius won MobiCom'24 Best-Paper Award.

Ongoing Research

Computing - Sensor-in-the-loop AI Agent: Developing personalized AI agents through multi-modal sensor technologies.
Sensing - Inside-out & Outside-in: Exploring various sensor modalities (acoustic, vision, and many others) for human-centric sensing.
Communication - Wireless Digital Twin: Understanding the wireless world through neural ray tracing.

We express our gratitude to the following agencies for their support of our research.

Group Members

Longfei Shangguan - PI

Tao Chen - Postdoc

Zhenlin An - Postdoc

Yongjie Yang - PhD student

Zhiwei Ren - PhD Student

Vaibhav Singh - PhD Student

Junbo Li - PhD Student

Hongbo Lan - PhD Student

Haoyu Li - Master Student

Maanya Shanker - Master Student

Niccolo Nobili - Undergraduate Student

Alumni

Yuxuan Zhang - master student, now PhD at TAMU

Yujing Huang - undergraduate researcher, now PhD at U Buffalo

Recent Publications

[IEEE Pervasive Computing, research brief] Towards Next-Generation Human Computer Interface Based On Earables

[MobiSys'24] Enabling Hands-Free Voice Assistant Activation on Earphones

[CHI'24] MAF: Exploring Mobile Acoustic Field for Hand-to-Face Gesture Interactions/p>

[MobiCom'24] Exploring the Feasibility of Remote Cardiac Auscultation Using Earphones

[MobiCom'24] Exploring Biomagnetism for Inclusive Vital Sign Monitoring: Modeling and Implementation

[MobiCom'24] Map++: Towards User-Participatory Visual SLAM Systems with Efficient Map Expansion and Sharing

[MobiCom'23] Taming Event Cameras with Bio-Inspired Architecture and Algorithm: A Case for Drone Obstacle Avoidance

[MobiCom'23] APG: Audioplethysmography for Cardiac Monitoring in Hearables

[MobiCom'23] Towards Spatial Selection Transmission for Low-end IoT devices with SpotSound

[MobiCom'22] RF-Transformer: A Unified Backscatter Radio Hardware Abstraction

[NSDI'22] CurvingLoRa to Boost LoRa Network Throughput Through Concurrent Transmissions

[NSDI'22] SwarmMap: Scaling Up Real-time Collaborative Visual SLAM at the Edge

[NSDI'22] Saiyan: Design and Implementation of a Low-power Demodulator for LoRa Backscatter Systems

Recent News

February 2025: awarded MassAITC Pilot Award! Thanks Massachusetts AI and Technology Center and National Institute on Aging (NIA).

January 2025: We visited Prof. Dame Diongue's group at Gaston Berger University, Senegal. What a wonderful trip!

November 2024: Asclepius won Best Paper Award at MobiCom'24!

September 2024: Wireless Digital Twin funded by Wireless and Spectrum program, thanks NSF.

Augst 2024: Thanks Meta for supporting our research on Sensor-in-the-loop AI agent.

March 2024: EarVoice accepted to MobiSys'24.

February 2024: CAREER Award! Thanks NSF.

January 2024: Mobile Acoustic Field (MAF) accepted to CHI'24.

November 2023: Asclepius, MagWear, and Map++ accepted to MobiCom'24.

October 2023: awarded the AIoTSys Young Scientist Award.

July 2023: Bio-inspired system design funded by CCSS program, thanks NSF.

June 2023: APG and BioDrone accepted to MobiCom'23 with shepherding.