Xiaoying Yang

I am a PhD student at Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), advised by Prof. Yang Zhang. Currently, my research is centered on harnessing the kinetic energy generated by people interactions with everyday objects to smarten up the environment by facilitating activity recognition and home automation. I am also broadly interested in the application of radar technologies in IoT, energy harvesting, ubiquitous sensing, wireless power transfer and wearable sensing.

News

Oct. 2023 Attended UIST in San Francisco and presented CubeSense++.
Oct. 2023 Attended Ubicomp in Cancun and presented Headar.
Aug. 2023 Headar is accepted to IMWUT.
Jun. 2023 CubeSense++ is conditionally accepted to UIST.
Oct. 2022 Attended UIST in Bend, OR. ForceSight demo received Best Demo Honorable Mention Award.
Sept. 2022 Attended Ubicomp in Atlanta and presented MiniKers.
Aug. 2022 My first full paper MiniKers is accepted to IMWUT!
Sept. 2021 Moved to LA. Excited to join UCLA ECE HiLab to pursue my PhD.
May 2021 Presented CubeSense at CHI.
Feb. 2021 CubeSense is accepted to CHI LBW 2021.

Research & Projects

Interaction-Power Stations: Turning Environments into Ubiquitous Power Stations for Charging Wearables (CHI 2024 LBW)

Xiaoying Yang, Jacob Sayono, Jess, Xu, Yang Zhang

Interaction-Power Stations enhance infrastructures in physical environments, facilitating energy generation, transfer, and sharing through user interactions.

Headar: Sensing Head Gestures for Confirmation Dialogs on Smartwatches with Wearable Millimeter-Wave Radar (IMWUT 2023)

Xiaoying Yang, Xue Wang, Gaofeng Dong, Zihan Yan, Mani Srivastava, Eiji Hayashi, Yang Zhang

Headar employs mmWave radar to detect head gestures, enabling fluent and natural interaction through nods and shakes between user and wearable devices.

CubeSense++: Smart Environment Sensing with Interaction-Powered Corner Reflector Mechanisms (UIST 2023)

Xiaoying Yang, Jacob Sayono, Yang Zhang

CubeSense++ are battery-free reflector mechanisms that can encode user interactions with everyday objects into structured responses to mmWave radar.

MiniKers: Interaction-Powered Smart Environment Automation (IMWUT 2022)

Xiaoying Yang, Jacob Sayono, Jess Xu, Jiahao "Nick" Li, Josiah Hester, Yang Zhang

MiniKers is a fleet of environment actuation devices that harness energy from user interactions with everyday objects. "Kers" comes from "Kinetic Energy Recovery System" that are widely used in automotive systems for recovering energy under braking.

ForceSight: Non-Contact Force Sensing with Laser Speckle Imaging (UIST 2022)

Siyou Pei, Pradyumna Chari, Xue Wang, Xiaoying Yang, Achuta Kadambi, Yang Zhang

ForceSight is a non-contact force sensing approach using laser speckle imaging. Surface deformations caused by force can be approximated by laser speckle shift.

CubeSense: Wireless, Battery-Free Interactivity through Low-Cost Corner Reflector Mechanisms (CHI 2021 LBW)

Xiaoying Yang, Yang Zhang

CubeSense is a sensing approach that encodes user interactivity (e.g. button press, switch toggle, slider position, knob rotation) into Radar Cross Section (RCS) of corner reflectors.