We have seen remarkable growth in smart devices and artificial intelligence in all aspects of our lives. Despite these successes, there still exists a large gap between realizing robust, practical, and omnipresent AI that coexists and interacts with humans and the physical world. There are many great success stories in bringing the benefits of AI from the productivity tools, digital assistants, and chatbots in the digital world to our physical world, ranging from smart wearables that track health and fitness, to sensors for monitoring the environment and robots that interact with our physical world. Traditionally, these diverse areas are explored by equally diverse communities. In this talk, we argue that to create truly autonomous and intelligent physical spaces, we need to co-design applications and services at all scales and levels with both humans and computers in the loop, ranging from infrastructure found all around our environments (e.g., sensors and smart speakers) down to wearables and personal smartphones enable humans and computers to interface with each other. Towards this vision, we will present several lines of work that 1) demonstrates how co-optimizing our environments with humans-in-the-loop can significantly improve important metrics for both our built environments (e.g., energy consumption) and humans (e.g., health and comfort), 2) enables new modalities for computers and AI to interact with our physical world through drones, robots, and foundation models, and 3) enhances the natural language interface between humans and the digital world through efficient AI architectures for speech enhancement.
Biography:
Stephen Xia is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. His research lies at the intersection between systems, embedded machine learning, and signal processing, spanning areas in mobile and embedded computing, Internet-of-Things, cyber-physical systems, artificial intelligence, and smart health. His work focuses on realizing truly intelligent and autonomous environments by embedding and utilizing compute, perception, actuation, storage, and networking resources commonly found all around us. Stephen’s research has been highlighted by many popular media outlets, including Mashable, Fast Company, and Gizmodo, and has received various distinctions including multiple Best Demo Awards, Best Presentation Awards, and Best Paper Awards. Prior to Northwestern, Stephen was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and received his B.S. from Rice University, all in Electrical Engineering.
