Indoor navigation and location tracking have been popular academic research topics in our community for more than a decade. This has lead to a vast amount of theoretical results, positioning techniques, and system prototypes that were developed in academia and industry research labs for efficient and accurate indoor localization and navigation. Marketplace adoption, however, has been slow|products have largely focused on outdoor positioning and navigation. Only recently has the industry buzz and investment in indoor positioning and navigation products picked up.
This panel will discuss whether indoor positioning solu- tions are nally ready for the marketplace. It will examine the limitations of the state of the art along dimensions such as precision, accuracy, energy consumption, complexity, and privacy and will debate in which areas, if any, further academic research is called for. The panelists will also discuss why adoption has been slow, whether any signicant non-technical hurdles remain, and speculate which technical solutions are most likely to succeed.
Marco Gruteser is an Associate
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University and a member of the Wireless
Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB). He is a pioneer in the area of location privacy and also
recognized for his work on connected vehicle applications. Beyond these topics, his 100+ peer-reviewed
articles and patents span a wide range of wireless, mobile systems, and pervasive computing issues.
He received his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Colorado in 2000 and 2004, respectively, and
has held research and visiting positions at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and Carnegie Mellon
University. His recognitions include an NSF CAREER award, a Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship
for Scholarly Excellence, as well as best paper awards at ACM MobiCom 2012, ACM MobiCom 2011 and ACM
MobiSys 2010. His work has been featured in numerous media outlets including the MIT Technology Review,
NPR, the New York Times, and CNN TV.
Panelist: Prof. Romit Roy Choudhury
Romit Roy Choudhury is
an Associate Professor of ECE at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). He joined UIUC
from Fall 2013, prior to which he was an Associate Professor at Duke University. Romit received his
PhD in the CS department of UIUC in Fall 2006. His research interests are in wireless protocol design
mainly at the PHY/MAC layer, and in mobile computing at the application layer. Along with his students,
he received a few research awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Google Faculty Award, best paper
at PersonalWireless Communications conference, Hoffmann Krippner Award for Engineering Innovations,
etc. Visit Romit's Systems Networking Research Group (SyNRG), at
http://synrg.ee.duke.edu.
Panelist: Prof. Moustafa Youssef
Moustafa
Youssef is an Associate Professor at Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology and Alexandria
University. He has been working on location determination systems, including the Horus indoor
localization system, PinPoint system, Nuzzer system, CellSense cellular localization system, systems
for localization in sensor and ad hoc networks, among others. He has tens of papers in the world's most
prestigious journals and conferences with thousands of citations on Google Scholar as well as ten
issued and pending patents. Prof. Youssef is the recipient of the 2004 Invention of the Year award from
the University of Maryland for his work in the Horus Location Determination System, the 2010 joint
TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award, the 2012 Egyptian State Award for Engineering Sciences, among others.
Panelist: Dr. Ravi Palanki
He is with
Qualcomm Research Silicon Valley, where he leads a team of engineers working on indoor positioning
algorithms. He received his B.Tech. in EE from IIT Madras in 2000, and M.S. and Ph.D. in EE from
Caltech in 2001 and 2004 respectively. During the course of his Ph.D., he was also a visiting
researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL),
and has been with Qualcomm Corporate R&D subsequently. Dr. Palanki was a key member of the team that
designed OFDMA-based wireless technologies and was responsible for the design and standardization of
several key features for Long Term Evolution (LTE), the predominant 4G technology in the world. His
research interests include wireless communications, information theory and probabilistic inference,
and he has around 20 journal/conference papers and 200 approved/pending patents in these areas.
Panelist: Dr. Jie Liu
Jie Liu is a Principal
Researcher and a Research Manager at Microsoft Research, leading the Sensing and Energy Research Group
(SERG). His group conducts fundamental and systems research on sensing and energy-efficient computing.
Before joining MSR in May 2004, he was a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC).
Since 2008, he also holds an adjunct professorship (Foreign PhD Advisor) at Harbin Institute of
Technology, China. He received his Ph.D. degree from EECS, UC Berkeley in 2001 and his Master (1996)
and Bachelor (1993) degrees from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He
is a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM since 2011, has received the Exceptional Student Award from
Tsinghua University (the highest student award) in 1996, the Leon O. Chua Award for outstanding
research from UC Berkeley in 2001, the Technology Advance Award from PARC in 2003, and the Gold Star
Award from Microsoft in 2008. He has also received, with co-authors, Best Paper Awards from RTAS 2010
and SenSys 2012.
Marco Gruteser is an Associate
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University and a member of the Wireless
Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB). He is a pioneer in the area of location privacy and also
recognized for his work on connected vehicle applications. Beyond these topics, his 100+ peer-reviewed
articles and patents span a wide range of wireless, mobile systems, and pervasive computing issues.
He received his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Colorado in 2000 and 2004, respectively, and
has held research and visiting positions at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and Carnegie Mellon
University. His recognitions include an NSF CAREER award, a Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship
for Scholarly Excellence, as well as best paper awards at ACM MobiCom 2012, ACM MobiCom 2011 and ACM
MobiSys 2010. His work has been featured in numerous media outlets including the MIT Technology Review,
NPR, the New York Times, and CNN TV.
Romit Roy Choudhury is
an Associate Professor of ECE at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). He joined UIUC
from Fall 2013, prior to which he was an Associate Professor at Duke University. Romit received his
PhD in the CS department of UIUC in Fall 2006. His research interests are in wireless protocol design
mainly at the PHY/MAC layer, and in mobile computing at the application layer. Along with his students,
he received a few research awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Google Faculty Award, best paper
at PersonalWireless Communications conference, Hoffmann Krippner Award for Engineering Innovations,
etc. Visit Romit's Systems Networking Research Group (SyNRG), at 
Moustafa
Youssef is an Associate Professor at Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology and Alexandria
University. He has been working on location determination systems, including the Horus indoor
localization system, PinPoint system, Nuzzer system, CellSense cellular localization system, systems
for localization in sensor and ad hoc networks, among others. He has tens of papers in the world's most
prestigious journals and conferences with thousands of citations on Google Scholar as well as ten
issued and pending patents. Prof. Youssef is the recipient of the 2004 Invention of the Year award from
the University of Maryland for his work in the Horus Location Determination System, the 2010 joint
TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award, the 2012 Egyptian State Award for Engineering Sciences, among others.
He is with
Qualcomm Research Silicon Valley, where he leads a team of engineers working on indoor positioning
algorithms. He received his B.Tech. in EE from IIT Madras in 2000, and M.S. and Ph.D. in EE from
Caltech in 2001 and 2004 respectively. During the course of his Ph.D., he was also a visiting
researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL),
and has been with Qualcomm Corporate R&D subsequently. Dr. Palanki was a key member of the team that
designed OFDMA-based wireless technologies and was responsible for the design and standardization of
several key features for Long Term Evolution (LTE), the predominant 4G technology in the world. His
research interests include wireless communications, information theory and probabilistic inference,
and he has around 20 journal/conference papers and 200 approved/pending patents in these areas.
Jie Liu is a Principal
Researcher and a Research Manager at Microsoft Research, leading the Sensing and Energy Research Group
(SERG). His group conducts fundamental and systems research on sensing and energy-efficient computing.
Before joining MSR in May 2004, he was a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC).
Since 2008, he also holds an adjunct professorship (Foreign PhD Advisor) at Harbin Institute of
Technology, China. He received his Ph.D. degree from EECS, UC Berkeley in 2001 and his Master (1996)
and Bachelor (1993) degrees from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He
is a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM since 2011, has received the Exceptional Student Award from
Tsinghua University (the highest student award) in 1996, the Leon O. Chua Award for outstanding
research from UC Berkeley in 2001, the Technology Advance Award from PARC in 2003, and the Gold Star
Award from Microsoft in 2008. He has also received, with co-authors, Best Paper Awards from RTAS 2010
and SenSys 2012.
