CSE is pleased to be home to new research work from Professor Wen Hu, who is the recipient, alongside Associate Professor Chun Tung Chou, of a significant, $405,000 ARC Discovery Projects 2022 grant.
CSE is pleased to be home to new research work from Professor Wen Hu, who is the recipient, alongside Associate Professor Chun Tung Chou, of a significant, $405,000 ARC Discovery Projects 2022 grant.
The project is investigating the capacities of mmWave radar devices–a special class of radar technology that uses short wavelength electromagnetic waves to sense and measure motion at the millimeter distance. The team hopes to lay the experimental foundations for showing how emerging commercial mmWave radar technologies and their ubiquitous hand-gesture sensing and recognition characteristics could be used in our homes and workplaces, and potentially, how they could sense human gestures for multiple smart environment applications at scale: including uses as varied as a new way for people to interact with computer systems; or an industrial facility wanting to automatically shut off machinery when a person gets too close.
The key to this breakthrough lies in harnessing mmWave radio to enable sensing beyond wireless communications–a recent technology breakthrough commercialized by Texas Instruments. Human gestures can be sensed by the radio signal patterns in a receiver, as different movements cause distinct signature fluctuations when they obstruct the paths between a sender and the receiver. Ultimately, the project aims to deliver a prototype of a fully functional and optimised hand gesture sensor network system, demonstrating mmWave-based sensing for smart environments in real-life scenarios. This research fulfills a critical role in the research to industry pipeline for new kinds of mmWave devices.
Main image: UNSW Professor Wen Hu
Wen Hu is a professor at CSE, whose research career has focused on wireless sensor networks, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT). He was the general chair of ACM/IEEE CPS and IoT Week 2020, serves as an editorial board member of ACM transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN) and the technical program co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023. Professor Hu was a principal research scientist and research project leader at CSIRO’s Digital Productivity Flagship. He is a recipient of the prestigious CSIRO Office of Chief Executive (OCE) Julius Career Award (2012–2015) and multiple research grants from the Australian Research Council, the CSIRO and commercial industries.
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Associate Professor Chun Tung Chou’s research interests at CSE are in networks, signals and systems. In particular, his current research focuses on molecular communications and computing, and pervasive computing. He has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications, IEEE Wireless Communications Letters and Nano Communication Networks.
