Abstract: In academia, it is a common practice to work with what you have in a best effort manner. However, it will also potentially narrow down your vision that prevents you from exploring out-of-band opportunities. In this talk, I will share my research journey from my first Ph.D. project, and highlight several key moments that made retrospectively “superlinear” impacts in my career from the unintentional academic social perspective.

Bio: Prof. Chenren Xu is a Boya Young Fellow Associate Professor, Deputy Director of Institute of Networking and Energy-efficient Computing and Assistant Dean of School of Computer Science at Peking University (PKU) where he directs Wireless AI for Science (WAIS) Lab. His research interests span wireless, networking and system, with a current focus on backscatter communication for low power IoT connectivity, future mobile Internet for high mobility data networking, and collaborative edge intelligence system for mobile and IoT computing. He earned his Ph.D. from WINLAB, Rutgers University, and worked as postdoctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon University, guest professor of Keio University and visiting scholars in AT&T Shannon Labs and Microsoft Research. He serves as an Editor of ACM IMWUT, General Chair of MobiSys’25, TPC Chair of UbiComp’25 and HotMobile’24, TPC & OC in SIGCOMM, NSDI, MobiCom and INFOCOM, and on the executive committee of SIGMOBILE and SIGBED. He is a recipient of Okawa Foundation Grant, NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund (aka “Chinese NSF CAREER Award”), ACM SIGCOMM China Rising Star, Alibaba DAMO Academy Young Fellow and CCF-Intel Young Faculty awards. His work has been featured in MIT Technology Review.

Hardware-Software Co-Design for Programmable Smart Radio Environments

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Physics-Informed AI for Wireless Communication and Sensing

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Assistive AR System for Enhancing Human-Human and Human-Environment Interactions

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Multi-user Intelligent Personalized Acoustic Field Manipulation

Exploiting and Securing WiFi for Pervasive Human Sensing

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mmWave Communications, Sensing, and Interference Mitigation

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Time-Resolved Designs for Narrowband Radio Localization and Vehicular Visual Sensing Compromise

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Measuring the Mobile Gap: From Network Performance to Infrastructure Criticality

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Federated LLM Pre-Training on Mobile Phones

Redesigning Mobile Systems for Foundation Models with model- and system-level orchestration

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Dissecting 5G in the Wild: Performance, Coverage, and Support for Next-Gen Applications

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Commodity Hardware for Scalable RAN Infrastructure and Agricultural Sensing

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Democratizing Earable Computing via Hardware-Software Co-design

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Beyond Backscatter: Rethinking Low-Power Wireless Communication to Tackle the Energy Challenge of Embedded Systems

Scalable and Adaptive RF Signal Propagation Modeling for Next-Generation Wireless Systems

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Time-sensitive AI System for Physical Agents

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Ubiquitous Acoustic Intelligence: Toward Intuitive, Resilient, and Secure Mobile Sensing Systems

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Building Generalizable Deep Learning Solutions for AIoT Applications

Towards Accurate, Adaptive, and Real-time Machine Perception on Resource-constrained Platforms

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Privacy-Aware Ambient Audio Sensing for Healthy Indoor Spaces

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Toward Reliable and Scalable LoRa Networking for Rural IoT

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Rethinking Inexpensive Wearables in the Era of AI: From Motion Analytics to Mobile Health