EVENT

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Talk on "Ubiquitous and Low-Overhead Floor Identification with Limited Cellular Information" by Prof. Moustafa Youssef from the American University in Cairo, Egypt

We are pleased to inform you about the upcoming seminar by Prof. Moustafa Youssef (the American University in Cairo, Egypt) titled:"Ubiquitous and Low-Overhead Floor Identification with Limited Cellular Information" Everyone interested is cordially invited to attend!

Title:

Ubiquitous and Low-Overhead Floor Identification with Limited Cellular Information

Abstract:

Floor identification has gained much attention due to the increasing demand for indoor location-based services, especially prompt emergency response services. Leveraging Cellular signals for floor identification has been of recent interest due to the pervasiveness of cellular technology. However, all current systems rely on information from multiple cell towers concurrently, which is inaccessible in most phones and thus severely limits their deployability.

We propose UniCellular, a ubiquitous and deployable floor identification system. UniCellular is the first system that meets the regulatory agencies' accuracy requirements while using the received signal strength information from only the serving cell tower. UniCellular handles multiple design challenges, including limited available information, noisy cellular data, overfitting, data collection overhead, and suitability for mobile device deployment. Our extensive experiments show UniCellular's effectiveness in multiple real testbeds, where it correctly estimates the user's exact floor up to 96% of the time using only the serving tower. This is better than the state-of-the-art cellular-based systems by up to 300%. Moreover, UniCellular achieves these improvements with significantly lower resource requirements than the state-of-the-art, giving up to more than an order of magnitude reduction in the model size. This shows UniCellular's superior performance while providing a ubiquitous, efficient, and practical solution that meets regulatory requirements.

Speaker Bio:

Moustafa Youssef is a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is the founder & director of the Wireless Research Center of Excellence, Egypt. His research interests include mobile wireless networks, mobile computing, location determination technologies, pervasive computing, and quantum computing. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE TMC and ACM TSAS, served as the Lead Guest Editor of the IEEE Computer Special Issue on Transformative Technologies and an Area Editor of ACM MC2R as well as on the organizing and technical committees of numerous prestigious conferences. He is the recipient of the 2003 University of Maryland Invention of the Year award, the 2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award for Young Scientists, the 2013 and 2014 COMESA Innovation Award, multiple Google Research Awards, among many others. He is also an IEEE and ACM Fellow.