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Hi, I am Yang Zhao, a Full Research Professor and PhD advisor at Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen. My research interests and expertise span sensing, signal processsing, edge computing, and artificial intelligence systems.

I was a Lead Research Engineer at GE Global Research, an Adjunct Professor at University at Albany, and a Research Intern at Microsoft Research. I receive my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Utah, and I am an IEEE senior member.

I have worked in various research domains including atmospheric remote sensing, industrial inspection, smart facilities, precision medical imaging, etc. I am always open to new ideas and research opportunities. If you would like to work together, feel free to contact me.

Contact Info


Recent News

  • Our paper Data-driven RF Tomography via Cross-modal Sensing and Continual Learning, was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Visual and Signal-Based Systems (AVSS 2025) in Taiwan in August 2025.
  • Lightweight Remote Sensing Scene Classification on Edge Devices via Knowledge Distillation and Early-exit, our paper was accepted by the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia to be held in Dublin, Ireland.
  • Underground Root Tuber Sensing via a Wi-Fi Mesh Network, MS student Said and PhD student Tao built a wireless potato sensing system, which will be demonstrated in ACM SenSys in May 2025.
  • Open-set Occluded Person Identification with mmWave Radar, our paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing in January 2025. Our mmWave radar-based person identification dataset is made publicly available at IEEE Dataport here .
  • E4: Energy-Efficient DNN Inference for Edge Video Analytics Via Early Exiting and DVFS, our paper was accepted by The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
  • TapWristband: A Wearable Keypad System Based on Wrist Vibration Sensing, our paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing in November 2024.
  • BCEdge: SLO-Aware DNN Inference Services with Adaptive Batch-Concurrent Scheduling on Edge Devices, our paper on the topic of edge intelligence was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management in June 2024.
  • Underground Potato Root Tuber Sensing via a Wireless Network , our wireless sensing demo won the Best Demo Runner-up at the IPSN Conference in May 2024.
  • DVFO: Learning-Based DVFS for Energy-Efficient Edge-Cloud Collaborative Inference, our paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing in January 2024.
  • Octopus: SLO-Aware Progressive Inference Serving via Deep Reinforcement Learning in Multi-Tenant Edge Cluster, PhD student Ziyang's paper was presented at the 21st International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) in Rome, Italy in November 2023 (acceptance rate 17%).
  • Person Identification Under Heavy Occlusions Using mmWave Radar, PhD student Tao's poster was presented at the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) in Istanbul, Turkey in November 2023.
  • CAS: Crop Aerial Sensing Simulation in Smart Farming, Undergrad students Jingyu and Xinrui's graduation project leads to a conference paper presented at IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON) in Madrid, Spain in September 2023.
  • Anatomy Registration via Patient Sensing for Chest X-ray Digital Tomosynthesis, our collaboration with California State University was presented at SPIE Medical Imaging 2023, San Diego, California, USA in February 2023.


    • Selected Projects

    Underground Root Tuber Sensing via a Wi-Fi Mesh Network
    Said Elhadi, Tao Wang, Yang Zhao.
    ACM SenSys’25, May, 2025, Irvin, CA, USA.

    Research domain: Wireless Sensing

    Our demo was accepted by SenSys 2025, Irvin, CA, USA.
    Demo
    POS: An Operator Scheduling Framework for Multi-model Inference on Edge Intelligent Computing
    Ziyang Zhang, Huan Li, Yang Zhao, Changyao Lin, Jie Liu.
    ACM/IEEE IPSN’23, May, 2023, San Antonio, USA.

    Research domain: Edge Computing

    PhD student Ziyang's work was presented in IPSN 2023, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
    Paper
    Containerized Mobile Sensing Simulation Framework for Smart Agriculture
    Jingyu Liu, Xinrui Xiao, Yang Zhao, Jie Liu.
    ACM SenSys’22, November, 2022, Boston, USA.

    Research domain: Cyber Physical System

    Undergrad students Jingyu and Xinrui's graduation project was demonstrated at SenSys 2022, Boston, USA.
    Demo
    Person Re-ID Testbed with Multi-Modal Sensors
    Guangliang Zhao, Guy Ben-yosef, Jianwei Qiu, Yang Zhao, Prabhu Janakaraj, Sriram Boppana, Austars R. Schnore.
    ACM DATA Workshop co-located with SenSys’21 and BuildSys’21, November 17, 2021, Coimbra, Portugal.

    Research domain: Intelligent Sensing, Sensor Fusion

    Paper
    Mobile X-ray Tomography System with Intelligent Sensing for 3D Chest Imaging
    Yang Zhao, E. Tkaczyk, A. Chen, B. Claus, K. Nye, and G. Rao.
    SPIE Medical Imaging 2021: Physics of Medical Imaging, February, 2021.

    Research domain: Intelligent Sensing, Medical Imaging

    Paper
    Aerial Inspection of Industrial Assets
    GE Global Research Robotics and Machine-to-machine team.
    Research project led to incubation of a new business. Research prototype led to the first product in 2017.

    Research domain: Industrial IoT, Robotics

    News
    Radio Tomographic Imaging and Tracking of Stationary and Moving People
    Yang Zhao, N. Patwari, J. M. Phillips, and S. Venkatasubramanian.
    IPSN, Philadelphia, PA, 2013.

    Research domain: Intelligent Sensing, Wireless Sensor Network

    Paper
    Retrieval of Cirrus Property with Ground-based Remote Sensing Data
    Yang Zhao, Jay Mace, Jennifer Comstock.
    Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 2011.

    Research domain: Remote Sensing

    Paper

    Selected Presentations

  • Invited talk at University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, November 2019.
  • Presenation at GE Edge Symposium, Niskayuna, New York, September 2017.
  • Invited talk at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, December 2016.
  • Invited talk at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, November 2015.
  • Invited talk at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, April 2012.
  • Presentation at the 18th Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program Meeting, Norfolk, VA, March 2008.


    • Teaching

  • [HIT Shenzhen, COMP2029] Domain-driven computer system design and practice, undergrad course, fall 2023.
  • [SUNY Albany, ICSI/ICEN 404] Computer Organization, undergrad course, spring 2018
  • [SUNY Albany, ICSI 504] Computer Organization, graduate course, fall 2017


    • Professional Services

  • Demo and Poster Co-Chair of the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2023) .
  • TPC member of the 20th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON 2023).
  • TPC member of the 10th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-efficient Built Environments (BuildSys 2023).
  • Chair of The 4th International SenSys+BuildSys Workshop on Data: Acquisition to Analysis (DATA).
  • Chair of The 3rd International SenSys+BuildSys Workshop on Data: Acquisition to Analysis (DATA).
  • TPC member of The 9th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys 2022).
  • Journal reviewer for IEEE TMC, TSP, TCOM, TVT, TKDE, TSPIN, ACM TIoT, etc.
  • Conference reviewer for IEEE ICC, GLOBECOM, SECON, RO-MAN, etc.
  • IEEE Senior member.


    • Group Activities

    Prof. Zhao attended the CCF CWSN annual meeting with colleagues
    in Dalian, Liaoning in October 2023.
    Graduate and undergrad students at the Shenzhen University Town
    in Shenzhen, Guangdong in July 2022.
    GE GRC researchers, family members and friends from different countries playing badminton
    at Clifton Park, New York in Feburary 2016.
    Professors and students attending the IEEE SECON Conference
    at the Snowbird ski resort in Utah in July 2011.


    Tools & Resources

  • Latex Beamer template.
  • Docker container with X11, ROS.
  • PX4 flight simulation with Gazebo, QGroundControl, MAVROS.
  • Web-based data analytics and visualization developed using Rt 106 framework.