About me!

Xie ZHANG (张勰) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the CS Department at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science, and the Chief Scientist of SenseAI Tech. He is a member of the HKU AIOT Lab, directed by Prof. Chenshu Wu. He received his M.S. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems from the School of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University, focusing on Wi-Fi sensing, and a B.Eng. in Software Engineering from Sun Yat-sen University.
My research focuses on privacy-first physical intelligence—using non-contact, privacy-preserving, ubiquitous sensing to help systems perceive, reconstruct, and reason about the physical world. I develop sensing and learning frameworks that transform sparse physical signals into structured, human-centric spatial representations for human-aware buildings, ubiquitous interaction, and non-intrusive health monitoring. Current topics:
  • Thermal Array–Based Spatial Sensing Intelligence: Physics-guided and learning-based frameworks that elevate low-resolution thermal arrays into 3D spatial representations for human detection, ranging, reconstruction, interaction, and building-scale occupancy analytics, with strong privacy and cost advantages.
  • Physics-Grounded and Interpretable Learning Models: Physics-learning co-models that embed physical principles, geometric constraints, and biomechanical structure into deep networks to improve robustness, interpretability, and generalizability.
  • Multi-modal and Cross-Modal Representation Learning: Aligning and fusing thermal, RF, WiFi, acoustic, and inertial signals into unified representation spaces that expose richer physical structure than any single modality, supported by multi-modal datasets and alignment methods.
I am open for any discussions and collaborations. Please feel free to contact me with zhangxie289 at gmail dot com.

Xie ZHANG

  • (2026) Ph.D. Computer Science, HKU
  • (2022) M.S. Pattern Recognition and Intelligence Systems, SYSU
  • (2019) B.S. Software Engineering, SYSU

News

One paper is conditionally accepted by MobiCom'26!

One paper is accepted by Ubicomp'26!

Received the 13th HLF Travel Grant Award

Honored to be recognized as a MobiSys'26 Rising Star

Chosen as a Young Researcher for the 13th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF)

... see all News

Selected Publications (Full Publications)

If you’d like to share my work and need slide decks, feel free to contact me with zhangxie289 at gmail dot com.

Preprints

  1. Publication thumbnail for TaFall: Balance-Informed Fall Detection via Passive Thermal Sensing
    TaFall: Balance-Informed Fall Detection via Passive Thermal Sensing
    Li, Chengxiao and Zhang, Xie and Zhu, Wei and Jiang, Yan and Wu, Chenshu
    arXiv, 2026

Conference proceedings

  1. CCF-A CORE A*
    Publication thumbnail for TAP3D: Thermal-Assisted 3D Human Point Clouds
    TAP3D: Thermal-Assisted 3D Human Point Clouds
    Zhang, Xie and Li, Chengxiao and Liu, Xinyuan and Wu, Chenshu
    The 32nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2026
  2. CCF-A CORE A*
    Publication thumbnail for Towards White-Box Deep Wireless Sensing
    Towards White-Box Deep Wireless Sensing
    Zhang, Xie and Wang, Yina and Wu, Chenshu
    Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol., 2026
  3. Publication thumbnail for From Body Heat to Behavioral Horizons: Spatial Sensing Intelligence with Thermal Arrays
    From Body Heat to Behavioral Horizons: Spatial Sensing Intelligence with Thermal Arrays
    Zhang, Xie
    Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services Companion, 2026, pp. 122–123
  4. CCF-A CORE A*
    Publication thumbnail for OctoNet: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Dataset for Human Activity Understanding Grounded in Motion-Captured 3D Pose Labels
    OctoNet: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Dataset for Human Activity Understanding Grounded in Motion-Captured 3D Pose Labels
    *Yuan, Dongsheng and *Zhang, Xie and Hou, Weiying and Lyu, Sheng and Yu, Yuemin and Yu, Luca Jiang-Tao and Li, Chengxiao and Wu, Chenshu
    The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025
    *Equal contribution
  5. CCF-A CORE A*
    Publication thumbnail for TAPOR: 3D Hand Pose Reconstruction with Fully Passive Thermal Sensing for around-Device Interactions
    TAPOR: 3D Hand Pose Reconstruction with Fully Passive Thermal Sensing for around-Device Interactions
    Zhang, Xie and Li, Chengxiao and Wu, Chenshu
    Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol., 2025
  6. CCF-B CORE’26 B
    Publication thumbnail for TADAR: Thermal array-based detection and ranging for privacy-preserving human sensing
    TADAR: Thermal array-based detection and ranging for privacy-preserving human sensing
    Zhang, Xie and Wu, Chenshu
    Proceedings of the 25th international symposium on theory, algorithmic foundations, and protocol design for mobile networks and mobile computing (MOBIHOC ’24), 2024, pp. 1–10
  7. CCF-C CORE’21 B
    Publication thumbnail for WiFi-Based Multi-task Sensing
    WiFi-Based Multi-task Sensing
    Zhang, Xie and Tang, Chengpei and An, Yasong and Yin, Kang
    Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, 2021, pp. 169–189

Journal articles

  1. CCF-C JCR Q1
    Publication thumbnail for WiFi-based Cross-Domain Gesture Recognition via Modified Prototypical Networks
    WiFi-based Cross-Domain Gesture Recognition via Modified Prototypical Networks
    Zhang, Xie and Tang, Chengpei and Yin, Kang and Ni, Qingqian
    IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2021, pp. 1–1

Awards & Honors

🎖️ The 13th HLF Travel Grant Award

🎖️ The 13th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) Young Researcher

🎖️ MobiSys’26 Rising Star

🎖️ Alibaba Cloud Most Scalable AI Solution Award (single-team award, 5000 USD) at the Global AI Challenge 2025

🎖️ Golden Award (top 5, 5000 USD) at the Global AI Challenge for Building E&M Facilities 2025

🎖️ MobiSys’24 Travel Grant Award

🎖️ HKU Postgraduate Scholarship

Services

🏛️  TPC Member,  ICPADS’25; HotSense @ ACM MobiCom 2025;

🏛️  Publicity Chair,  HotSense @ ACM MobiCom 2025;

🏛️  Artifact Evaluation Committee,  ACM MobiCom 2023; ACM MobiSys 2023; USENIX ATC 2022;

🏛️  Invited Reviewer,  APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing; IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ); Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT); International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS’24); IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC);

🏛️  ACM Transactions on Internet of Things Distinguished Reviewer,  TIOT Journal;

Talks

🎙️  Spatial Sensing Intelligence with Thermal Arrays | invited talk
    🚩Invited Talk @ BUPT , 📅 2026-8-7, 📍 Beijing, China
    🔍 How to leverage thermal arrays to obtain the human spatial/geometric information at scale?

🎙️  Hands-on Tutorial on Thermal Sensing | invited talk
    🚩HotSense @ MobiCom 2025 , 📅 2025-11-8, 📍 Hong Kong
    🔍 Thermal array sensing for resolving the paradox of ubiquitous thermal signals yet scarce perception systems.

🎙️  TAPOR | conference presentation
    🚩UbiComp 2025 , 📅 2025-10-15, 📍 Espoo, Finland
    🔍 3D Hand Pose Reconstruction with Fully Passive Thermal Sensing for around-Device Interactions.

🎙️  TADAR | conference presentation
    🚩MobiHoc 2024 , 📅 2024-10-16, 📍 Athens, Greece
    🔍 Thermal Array-based Detection and Ranging for Privacy-Preserving Human Sensing.

Teaching

🧑‍🏫  COMP7310,  Artificial intelligence of things Spring 2026
🧑‍🏫  COMP3270,  Artificial intelligence Fall 2024
🧑‍🏫  COMP3314,  Machine learning Fall 2023
🧑‍🏫  CS3230,  Operating system Fall 2022

Rejection Letters

Every paper eventually finds its home, but acceptance is never the end of the research.