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. My research interests lie broadly in IoT systems, edge computing and mobile computing.

Recent News

  • [Wireless Sensing] Our paper "Proteus: Enhanced mmWave Leaf Wetness Detection with Cross-Modality Knowledge Transfer" is accepted by ACM SenSys 2025. Congratulations to Yimeng!
  • [Service] Invited to be the Finance Co-Chair of ACM MobiCom 2025
  • [Wireless Networking] Our paper "AeroEcho: Towards Agricultural Low-power Wide-area Backscatter with Aerial Excitation Source" is accepted by IEEE INFOCOM 2025. Congratulations to Yidong!
  • [Edge ML] Our paper "GeoFL: A Framework for Efficient Geo-Distributed Cross-Device Federated Learning" is accepted by IEEE INFOCOM 2025. Congratulations to Maolin!
  • [Wireless Sensing] Our paper "Adonis: Neural-enhanced Fine-grained Leaf Wetness Sensing with Efficient mmWave Imaging" is accepted by IEEE INFOCOM 2025. Congratulations to Yimeng!
  • [Media Report] My NSF CAREER Award has been highlighted in several reports of MSU Engineering Communications, MSU Today, and Spartan Community Letter . Go Green!

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

Our EIN research group focus on broad networking optimization and computational intelligence topics we have met during developing and implementing various edge and IoT systems that can enhance MSU's strength.
Research Projects:
  • MindCare: Long-term sensing and monitoring IoT and edge systems for mental health. (2024 - Present)
  • FarmEye: A large-scale agriclture data collection system with LoRa. (2021 - Present)
NSF Grants:
  • CAREER: LoRa Enabled Space-air-ground Integrated Networks for Next-Generation Agricultural IoT. 2024 - 2029. [Project Website]
  • Collaborative Research: NeTS: Medium: Towards High-Performing LoRa with Embedded Intelligence on the Edge (Leading PI). 2023 - 2027. [Project Website]

Recent Publications (Year 2025)

  • Yimeng Liu, Maolin Gan, Huaili Zeng, Yidong Ren, Gen Li, Jingkai Lin, Younsuk Dong, Xiaobo Tan, and Zhichao Cao.
    Proteus: Enhanced mmWave Leaf Wetness Detection with Cross-Modality Knowledge Transfer. SenSys 2025.
    [PDF]
  • Yidong Ren, Gen Li, Yimeng Liu, Younsuk Dong, and Zhichao Cao.
    AeroEcho: Towards Agricultural Low-power Wide-area Backscatter with Aerial Excitation Source. INFOCOM 2025.
    [PDF]
  • Yimeng Liu, Maolin Gan, Gen Li, Younsuk Dong, and Zhichao Cao.
    Adonis: Neural-enhanced Fine-grained Leaf Wetness Sensing with Efficient mmWave Imaging. INFOCOM 2025.
    [PDF]
  • Maolin Gan, Lanpeng Li, Samiul Alam, Li Liu, Luyang Liu, Mi Zhang, and Zhichao Cao.
    GeoFL: A Framework for Efficient Geo-Distributed Cross-Device Federated Learning. INFOCOM 2025.
    [PDF]

Teaching

  • Fall 2020/Spring 2021, 2022, 2023, CSE-220, Programming in C
  • Spring 2020/Fall 2021, 2022, 2023, CSE-891, AIoT: Artificial Intelligence in the Edge
  • Spring 2024, 2025, CSE-410, Operating System

Quote

"Nothing endures but change."

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