Yingying (Jennifer) Chen

Abstract

A the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Network, I am pleased to announce the new column, “Women in Networks”. Computer communications and networking have made tremendous advancements in the past 20 years. They have become the backbone for many mobile, edge, and IoT devices that we interact with and utilize in our work and throughout our daily lives. This great technology’s convenience in today’s life is all owed to the researchers and engineers who diligently work in the networking community. Among them, women who work in the computer communications and networking areas have made invaluable contributions to technology advancements. This new column, “Women in Networks”, aims to introduce distinguished female researchers, engineers, and educators who have been actively working and dedicating themselves in the research and development of computer communications and networking domain. I hope their stories will make people more aware of the unique contributions coming from these dedicated female researchers and engineers. I also hope young female students and researchers will be intrigued to work in the exciting information technology domain and contribute to reshaping future technology. In this inaugural issue of the new column, I would like to introduce Dr. Yingying (Jennifer) Chen. Dr. Chen will serve as the Editor of this new column. She will collect and tell you the stories of many distinguished female scientists and engineers in this exciting area. Yingying (Jennifer) Chen is a professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and Peter Cherasia Endowed Faculty Scholar at Rutgers University. She is the Associate Director of the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB). She also leads the Data Analysis and Information Security (DAISY) Lab. She currently serves as the Graduate Director of ECE. She is an IEEE Fellow. Her research interests include mobile sensing and computing, cyber security and privacy, Internet of Things, and smart healthcare. Her background is a combination of computer science, computer engineering and physics. She had a great passion for physics in high school and chose to study condensed matter physics during her undergraduate study at Nanjing University. She was fortunate to receive early admission to the Gifted Young Program at Nanjing University, exempted from the National College Admission Examinations. She then becaime fascinated by the Unix programming environment when pursuing her Ph.D. study in physics in U.S. and decided to switch to computer science. This was one of the most important decision in her career, which led to the start of her career working on networking management systems at Nokia (previously Lucent Technologies as shown in Fig. 1). The product-driven networking related projects at Nokia have broadened her knowledge and vision in computer networks and equipped her with hands-on experience in both research and development of Nokia’s optical networking backbone products and the critical aspects in the networking management systems. Eventually, she decided to make the second most important decision in her career and switched from industry to academia. Ever since then, she feels she started an amazing journey in conveying her knowledge to many young students with eagerly learning minds and exploring the power of fundamental research, which demonstrated great impact on the general public in our society. Dr. Chen is recognized as a pioneer and technical leader in the areas of mobile computing and mobile security. She envisioned that with the ubiquitous usage of wireless technologies and mobile devices, mobile computing combines communications among people, context-aware mobile sensing and continuous access to networked services, providing unprecedented opportunities to build a broad array of emerging mobile systems and applications. She was among the fi rst to integrate the computing, sensing, communication capabilities, and software-hardware architecture co-design for low-power heterogeneous mobile edge devices to build mobile safety systems, mobile healthcare systems, and localization systems. Her computing algorithms in mobile safety systems demonstrate that the mobile devices that we carry and wear can provide eff ective safety services by sensing our activities and surroundings and identifying dangerous situations. This line of work has resulted in recognizable mobile and wearable device-based systems for driver phone use detection as illustrated in Fig. 2 [1, 2], dangerous driving behavior detection [3], pedestrian safety services, and massive road data acquisition for dependable self-driving. It has also been recognized with the Best Paper Award from the prestigious ACM MobiCom 2011. Furthermore, Dr. Chen is one of the pioneers to tackle the activity identifi cation and vital signs monitoring problems in home environments, which can support mobile healthcare applications including well-being management, elder care, and latchkey child safety. She takes a unique viewpoint of activity identification at home through reusing the commodity Wi-Fi and smart devices (e.g., voice assistant system, refrigerator, and smart TV). Her low-cost system extracts fi ne-grained channel features and can uniquely identify various kinds of human activities as shown in Fig. 3 [4] and further accurately monitor vital signs (including both breathing rate and heartbeat) during sleep without requiring a user to wear any devices [5]. This line of work represents a significant advancement in device-free activity identifi cation and monitoring by reusing prevalent WiFi for long-term wellbeing monitoring and home safety. She is also among the pioneers to develop fundamental theories and key techniques for wireless localization systems, which is a critical enabler in a broad range of location-based services. Dr. Chen is also the fi rst to propose using peer phones and acoustic ranging to signifi cantly improve the accuracy of WiFi localization with minimum auxiliary COTS sound hardware on smartphones [6]. It is among the fi rst works to combine multiple complementary techniques to improve indoor localization for smartphones. This project discovers the root cause of large errors in WiFi-based localization systems and devises a novel peer-assisted localization algorithm that leverages acoustic ranging and locates peer phones jointly to achieve improved accuracy. The results of the project advance wireless localization techniques by providing high accuracy and robustness for emerging location-based applications, which demand high location accuracy. The proposed localization system for smartphones is critical to enable novel features in facilitating the widespread deployment of pervasive location-aware applications as the accurate location is a critical input to those high-level applications. With the wide adoption and deployment of mobile computing, mobile security becomes increasingly important. Dr. Chen proposes that location-oriented information can be built into any mobile wireless network stack and serve as a promising new dimension across diff erent layers from the physical layer to the application layer to complement conventional security solutions and enhance mobile security. In particular, her research team is one of the fi rst to devise techniques for practical secret key generation, detecting the presence of identity-based WOMEN IN NETWORKS