portrait
Zhichao Cao Ph.D
Office: Room 3224, Engineering Building, 428 S. Shaw Lane, East Lansing, MI 48824
Email: caozc at msu dot edu

Biography

I am an assistant professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University (MSU). I am also a faculty affiliate of AgBioResearch at MSU. I joined MSU at 2020. Before that, I had worked in School of Software, Tsinghua University for 6 years. I received my Ph.D. degree supervised by Yunhao Liu at 2013 in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Hong Kong University of Scienc and Technology. I received my B.E. degree at 2009 in the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University. My research interests lie broadly in IoT systems, edge computing and mobile computing. Currently, I serve as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), which is the flag journal related to computational intelligence in IoT.

News

  • [Service] Invited to be a TPC member of ACM SenSys Poster/Demo 2023.
  • [Service] Invited to be a TPC member of EAI MobiQuitous 2023.
  • [Award] Yidong Ren won the Travel Grant of MobiHoc 2023. Congratulation to Yidong.
  • [Award] I won a NSF grant entitled "Towards High-Performing LoRa with Embedded Intelligence on the Edge". Thank NSF for the support.
  • [Wireless Networking] Our paper "SRLoRa: Neural-enhanced LoRa Weak Signal Decoding with Multi-gateway Super Resolution" is accepted by ACM MobiHoc 2023.
  • [Service] Invited to be a TPC member of IEEE MSN 2023 and IEEE DySpan 2024.
  • [Service] Invited to be a TPC member of IEEE INFOCOM 2024.
  • [Award] Maolin Gan and Gen Li won the Travel Grant of MobiSys 2023. Congratulation to Maolin and Gen.
  • [Moibile Security] Our paper "EchoAttack: Practical Inaudible Attacks To Smart Earbuds" is accepted by ACM MobiSys 2023.
  • [Wireless Sensing] Maolin Gan have presented a poster of our pilot study on agriculture sensing with wireless signals at AI in Ag conference in Orlando, Florida.
  • [Award] Li Liu won the Travel Grant of CPS Week 2023. Congratulation to Li.
  • [Dataset/Benchmark] Our NELoRa Benchmark "NELoRa-Bench: A Benchmark for Neural-enhanced LoRa Demodulation" is accepted by ICLR 2023 workshop ML4IoT (Oral).
  • [Mobile Application] Our paper "FaceTouch: Practical Face Touch Detection with a Multimodal Wearable System for Epidemiological Surveillance" is accepted by ACM/IEEE IoTDI 2023.
  • [Service] Invited to be poster/demo chair of IEEE MASS 2023.
  • [Wireless Networking] Our paper "Prism: High-throughput LoRa Backscatter with Non-linear Chirps" is accepted by IEEE INFOCOM 2023.

Edge Intelligence and Networking (EIN) Group [Group Members]

Our EIN research group consists of 6 PhD candidates with diverse undergraduate backgrounds. We focus on broad networking optimization and computational intelligence topics we have met during developing and implementing various edge and IoT systems.
Research Projects:
  • FedIoT: Efficient and Scalable Federated Learning systems for IoT. (2021 - Present)
  • FarmEye: A large-scale agriclture data collection and analysis system with LoRa and AI. (2021 - Present)
  • DeepSensing: Deep Neural Network augmented RF sensing systems. (2020 - Present)
  • MobileSEC: Mobile system security and privacy ralted to cameras and microphones. (2020 - Present)
  • IndoorSys: Practical tracking systems in indoor environments with mobile devices and RF infrastrucutres. (2019 - 2022)
  • LoSee: A wide-area vehicle tracking system with LoRa. (2018 - 2020)
  • BatteryLink: A product-cycle management system for lead batteries. (2016 - 2019)
  • OilNet: A high speed mesh back-bone network for wild oil fields. (2014 - 2016)
  • CitySee: A long-term city-wide urban sensing system for Carbon balance evaluation and environmental surveillance. (2012 - 2014)
  • GreenOrbs: A long-term kilo-scale wireless sensor network system in the vast forest. (2009 - 2012)

I am recruting motivated PhD students who share the same research interests with us.

Surveys, Highlights, and Benchmarks

  • Jialuo Du, Yidong Ren, Mi Zhang, Yunhao Liu, and Zhichao Cao.
    NELoRa-Bench: A Benchmark for Neural-Enhanced LoRa Demodulation. ML4IoT Workshop on ICLR 2023.
    [PDF]
  • Chenning Li, Hanqing Guo, Shuai Tong, Zhichao Cao, Mi Zhang, Qiben Yan, Li Xiao, Jiliang Wang, and Yunhao Liu.
    NELoRa: Neural-enhanced Demodulation for Low-Power WANs. ACM SIGMOBILE GetMobile, (Sep, 2022). (SenSys'21 Best Paper)
    [PDF]
  • Chenning Li, and Zhichao Cao.
    LoRa Networking Techniques for Large-scale and Long-term IoT: A Down-to-top Survey. ACM Computing Survey (CSUR) 55(3):52, (2022).
    [PDF]
  • Chenning Li, Zhichao Cao, and Yunhao Liu.
    Deep AI Enabled Ubiquitous Wireless Sensing: A Survey. ACM Computing Survey (CSUR) 54(2):32, (2021).
    [PDF]

Selected Publications [Full List]

    Wireless Sensing

  • Chenning Li, Li Liu, Zhichao Cao, and Mi Zhang.
    WiVelo: Fine-grained Walking Velocity Estimation for Wi-Fi Passive Tracking. SECON 2022.
    [PDF]
  • Chenning Li, Manni Liu, and Zhichao Cao.
    WiHF: Gesture and User Recognition with Wi-Fi. TMC 21(2):757-768, (2022).
    [PDF]
  • Chenning Li, Zheng Liu, Yuguang Yao, Zhichao Cao, Mi Zhang, and Yunhao Liu.
    Wi-Fi See It All: Generative Adversarial Network-augmented Versatile Wi-Fi Imaging. Sensys 2020.
    [PDF]

    • Wireless Networking

  • Yidong Ren, Puyu Cai, Jinyan Jiang, Jialuo Du, and Zhichao Cao.
    Prism: High-throughput LoRa Backscatter with Non-linear Chirps. INFOCOM 2023.
    [PDF]
  • Yidong Ren*, Li Liu*, Chenning Li*, Zhichao Cao, and Shigang Chen. (* equal contribution)
    Is LoRaWAN Really Wide? Fine-grained LoRa Link-level Measurement in An Urban Environment. ICNP 2022.
    [PDF]
  • Chenning Li, Xiuzhen Guo, Longfei Shangguan, Zhichao Cao, and Kyle Jamieson.
    CurvingLoRa to Boost LoRa Network Throughput via Concurrent Transmission. NSDI 2022.
    [PDF]

    • ML/Edge System

  • Chenning Li, Xiao Zeng, Mi Zhang, and Zhichao Cao.
    PyramidFL: A Fine-grained Client Selection Framework for Efficient Federated Learning. MobiCom 2022.
    [PDF]

    • Mobile Security/Application

  • Gen Li, Zhichao Cao, and Tianxing Li.
    EchoAttack: Practical Inaudible Attacks To Smart Earbuds. MobiSys 2023.
    [PDF]
  • Li Liu, Zhichao Cao, and Tianxing Li.
    FaceTouch: Practical Face Touch Detection with a Multimodal Wearable System for Epidemiological Surveillance. IoTDI 2023.
    [PDF]
  • Hanqing Guo, Chenning Li, Lingkun Li, Zhichao Cao, Qiben Yan, and Li Xiao.
    NEC: Speaker Selective Cancellation via Neural Enhanced Ultrasound Shadowing. DSN 2022.
    [PDF]

Teaching

  • Fall 2020/Spring 2021, CSE-220, Programming in C
  • Spring 2020/Fall 2021, CSE-891, AIoT: Artificial Intelligence in the Edge

Codes and Datasets

  • L2 Implementation in TinyOS.
    [ZIP]
  • Chase Implementation in TinyOS.
    [ZIP]
  • NELoRa codes and datasets.
    [Link]
  • CurvingLoRa codes and datasets.
    [Link]
  • PyramidFL codes and datasets.
    [Link]
  • WiSIA: Wi-Fi imagings datasets.
    [Link]

Quote

"Nothing endures but change."

- Heraclitus, Greek philosopher (540 BC - 480 BC)