Team Takes Best Paper Award at IEEE Conference

A team of researchers from The Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and Fudan University in China took the Best Paper Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics (IEEE) Eighth Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference, which was held at Columbia University in fall 2017.

Authors of the paper included Dr. Dian Zhou, professor of electrical and computer engineering; Dr. Qingxue Zhang, who earned a PhD in the Jonsson School and is now a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University; and Dr. Xuan Zeng from Fudan University.

Selected as best paper on the electronic instrumentation track, “PulsePrint: Single-arm-ECG Biometric Human Identification Using Deep Learning” focuses on the privacy and security challenges brought on by emerging smart health applications.

The paper proposes a biometric human identification system as a wearable technology.

“In this study, we take special interest in the electrocardiogram (ECG)-based human identification. The ECG signal is unique to each individual, and is regarded as an attractive biometric for user identification purpose,” the authors wrote in the paper.

The researchers introduce deep learning techniques, to self-learn the features from raw ECG data, which saves time and resources.

“This experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed system. In the future, more data will be collected to further evaluate a proof-of-concept,” the authors added.

Dr. Zhou joined The University of Texas at Dallas as a full professor in 1999.

He has received a number of accolades for his work, including the IEEE Circuits and Systems and Society Darlington Award in 1993; NSF Young Investigator Award in 1994; Chinese NSF Oversea’s Outstanding Young Scientist Award in 2000; Chinese Yangzi River Scholar in 2002; and was selected as “Thousand People Plan” professor in China in 2011.

Dr. Zhou was an Associate Editor for IEEE’s Transactions on Circuits and Systems from 1996 to 1998, and the panel member of “Moving up the Technology Chain” at the World Economy Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2006. He is currently associate editor of Science in China, and an IEEE senior member.