Niki Trigoni

Cyber physical systems for emergency response

Abstract: Emergency situations present some of the most challenging and unusual scenarios for sensing and scene understanding; yet, it is in these situations, where situation awareness is of paramount importance and where technology is needed the most to help protect human lives. In this talk, I will present some of the key challenges faced by sensing and machine learning algorithms in emergency situations, including lack of pre-installed sensing infrastructure, lack of training data, sensor failure, and limited visibility and connectivity. I will then present recent research directions that we have pursued to address these challenges including multi-modal sensing, cross modality training and human-robot interaction.


About the speaker: Niki Trigoni is Professor at the Oxford Department of Computer Science, heading the Cyber Physical Systems Group. Her interests lie in the tight integration of sensing and machine intelligence for context inference, control and human-machine interaction. She has applied her work to a number of application scenarios, including mobile autonomy, asset monitoring, and localisation systems for emergency situations, as well as workforce safety and efficiency. Trigoni has founded and served from 2014-2019 as Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training on Autonomous and Intelligent Machines and Systems. Driven by her passion for research translation, in 2015, she founded Navenio Ltd, a deep tech Oxford spinout on infrastructure free indoor positioning, and a 2020 KPMB Best British Tech Pioneer. In 2020, she won the CTO of the Year award at the UK's Women in IT Awards, demonstrating impact from translating positioning tech to improve efficiency in the healthcare sector.

Mo Li

Our deployment and measurement experience with LoRa

Abstract: Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) will be an important paradigm of wireless networks for the Internet of Things (IoT), which is complementary to cellular networks (e.g., 5G) and short-range wireless networks (e.g., Wi-Fi and Zigbee). This talk will share our recent deployment and measurement experience with LoRa, a major LPWAN technology based on unlicensed ISM frequency bands that allow free deployments. The talk will present how the LoRa promises on radio power reduction, communication range, and channel multiple access are realistic as evaluated in practice. The talk will also introduce our research efforts to explore MAC and PHY alternatives beyond standard LoRa, for improved communication and networking efficiency.

About the speaker: Dr. Mo Li is a Professor from Nanyang Technological University. Dr. Mo Li has been internationally recognized for his research in wireless sensing and networking, IoT for smart cities and urban informatics. Over the past few years, Dr. Li has developed numerous methods, techniques, and systems that resulted in papers published in top journals and conferences with over 9000 citations. Dr. Li has been on the editorial board of leading journals in the field including IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet of Things, and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Dr. Li served the technical program committee member for top conferences in computer system and networking, including ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiSys, ACM SenSys, and many others. Dr. Li is a Distinguished Member of the ACM since 2019, and a Fellow of the IEEE since 2020.