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Wi-Fi signals could prove useful for spies
The Economist online
2023-01-25
Extract:
Like all radio waves, Wi-Fi signals undergo subtle shifts when they encounter objects—human beings included. These can reveal information about the shape and motion of what has been encountered, in a manner akin to the way a bat’s chirps reveal obstacles and prey.
Starting from this premise Jiaqi Geng, Dong Huang and Fernando De la Torre, of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, wondered if they could use Wi-Fi to record the behaviour of people inside otherwise unobservable rooms. As they describe in a posting on arXiv, they have found that they can. “DensePose from Wi-Fi”, the paper in question, describes how they ran Wi-Fi signals from a room with appropriate routers in it through an artificial-intelligence algorithm trained on signals from people engaging in various, known activities. This algorithm was able to reconstruct moving digital portraits, called pose estimations, of the individuals in the room.
Mr Geng, Dr Huang and Dr De la Torre are not the first to think of doing this. But they seem to have made a significant advance. Earlier experiments had managed to obtain two-dimensional (2D) pose estimations based on as many as 17 “vector points” on the body—such as head, chest, knees, elbows and hands. The new paper, by contrast, describes “2.5D” portraits that track 24 vector points (see picture). And, according Dr Huang, the team has now built an enhanced version capable of generating complete 3D body reconstructions that track thousands of vector points. Moreover, this work employed standard antennas of the sort used in household Wi-Fi routers. Previous efforts have relied on souped-up versions of the equipment.
Detailed Wi-Fi-based body-tracking with a standard-issue router would have many uses. Mr Geng, Dr Huang and Dr De la Torre talk of employing it to “monitor the well-being of elder people”. A team working on similar technology, led by Yili Ren of Florida State University, suggests it could be used in interactive gaming and exercise monitoring. And, in 2016, Dina Katabi, Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated how Wi-Fi-like radio signals could detect a volunteer’s heartbeat (and thus his or her emotional state) remotely.
Carnegie Mellon Launches New XR Technology Center
GovTech online
2023-11-04
"XR technologies will allow us to mix the digital world and the real world in ways that will improve how we work, play, learn, connect and care for ourselves and others," Fernando De La Torre, a co-director of the XRTC and an associate research professor in the Robotics Institute, said in a public statement. "This is happening now. The technology is not yet mature, but the breakthrough is going to happen in the next five to 10 years, and CMU will be there when it happens."
Education
La Salle School of Engineering, Ramon Llull University
Ph.D.
Electrical Engeineering
La Salle School of Engineering, Ramon Llull University
M.S.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
La Salle School of Engineering, Ramon Llull University
B. Electric Engineering and Computer Sciences
Electronic Engineering
Languages
- Spanish-Catalan
- English
Articles
Fernando De la Torre Google Scholar
Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
Fernando De la Torre's comprehensive list of publications via Google Scholar.
