Xu receives best paper award

by Nicole Capozziello

Published January 2, 2020

Wenyao Xu, associate professor of computer science and engineering, received the best paper award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys).

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“Wenyao and his students have an excellent track record in publishing their cutting-edge work in top conferences such as ACM's SenSys, and winning this best paper award is a culmination of their efforts over the past several years."
Chunming Qiao, SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Wenyao Xu.

Wenyao Xu

ACM SenSys is an annual, international flagship research conference in the areas of smart systems and mobile computing. 2019 marked the conference’s 17th year.

The paper, “FerroTag: A Paper-based mmWave-Scannable Tagging Infrastructure,” by Zhengxiong Li, Baicheng Chen, Huining Li, Chenhan Xu, Xingyu Chen, Kun Wang, and Wenyao Xu, all from UB's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, presents a promising tagging infrastructure to be used in inventory management systems.

The paper highlights the shortcomings of current tagging systems, the researchers’ proposed infrastructure FerroTag, and an evaluation of FerroTag, which can identify tags with an accuracy of more than 99% in a controlled lab set-up, and over 97% in various real-world circumstances.

“What we invented in this work can provide similar functionalities to Apple’s iBeacon. Like other Bluetooth beacons, it can be used wireless to locate and find the target of interest in some space,” says Xu. “Traditional iBeacon products are usually much bigger, non-biodegradable and pricy, costing a few dollars. Our new paper-based iBeacon is biodegradable and batteryless–and our tag is much cheaper, at only about one cent each.”

This research is partly supported by the National Science Foundation. It has the potential to transform indoor localization technology by making it cheaper, more flexible and more environmentally sustainable.

“Wenyao and his students have an excellent track record in publishing their cutting-edge work in top conferences such as ACM's SenSys, and winning this best paper award is a culmination of their efforts over the past several years,” says Chunming Qiao, SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “Mobile Computing is one of the research strengths in in our department, and we have several excellent faculty members and graduate students in this important area.”  

ACM SenSys 2019 took place in New York City from November 10-13, 2019.