Next-Generation Wireless Sensing for Non-intrusive Autonomous Environment Monitoring by Dr. Deepak Mishra

Abstract

The ability to monitor environments using futuristic, non-intrusive autonomous technologies was once a mere science fiction dream. However, recent developments in wireless sensing have demonstrated that this future is now a reality. It has been established that changes in the physical environment influence wireless transmissions, and these changes in received signal power have been leveraged for precise sensing of these environments. Specifically, the underlying channel state information (CSI) is fed to artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms after data and signal processing, which can be utilised for desired prediction and classification. This technology has found multiple applications in the field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), including behaviour monitoring, object detection, occupancy counting, gesture detection, heartbeat or healthcare monitoring, temperature sensing, fire detection, network traffic classification, and even simultaneous localisation and mapping in robotics.
WiFi applications for these sensing problems are fascinating due to the widespread penetration of IoT signals in commercial and domestic environments. A further benefit of WiFi as a wireless sensing medium is its non-intrusive nature compared to other sensing technologies, such as cameras, wearable tags, and smartphone apps. This research talk will focus on the next-generation wireless sensing-based ICT, highlighting opportunities and challenges and discussing how backscattering capability can enable autonomous and sustainable sensing. The underlying privacy implications and some defence strategies to safeguard critical activities will also be discussed. The objective is to disseminate recent findings and our experimentally validated research outcomes on WiFi sensing for ICT and environmental monitoring applications, while discussing the robustness, resilience, and autonomous attributes, as well as the way forward for this AI-enabled wireless sensing technology.

Biography

Deepak Mishra is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of Postgraduate Academic Studies at the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. He is also a co-founder and CTO of a UNSW-based startup company called GinigAI Pty Ltd, which utilises Embedded Radio Intelligence for safety purposes. He received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi, New Delhi, in 2017. Before joining UNSW, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Linköping University in Sweden from August 2017 to July 2019. He has held Visiting Researcher positions at Northeastern University and the University of Rochester in the USA, Huawei Technologies in France, Southwest Jiaotong University in China, and Queen's University of Belfast, UK. He has received some prestigious research awards, including the IBM PhD. Fellowship Award in 2016, Raman Charpak Fellowship Award in 2017, Endeavour Research Fellowship Award in 2018, and the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2022, IEEE SPS Entrepreneurship Forum's Best Pitch Award at ICASSP 2026.
Deepak's research focus includes AI-enabled wireless sensing, energy harvesting cooperative communication networks, massive MIMO, privacy-aware backscattering, physical layer security, as well as signal processing and energy optimisation schemes for the uninterrupted operation of wireless networks. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, IEEE Communications Letters, IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, and IEEE Access, and has served as a Guest Editor for multiple Q1 publications. He was named a Best Editor for IEEE Wireless Communications Letters in 2023 and was selected as an Exemplary Reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in 2017 and 2018, of IEEE Wireless Communications Letters in 2019, and of IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2019 and 2020.