This spring, the Edge-IoT project, one of the incubated initiatives at the Duke Kunshan University Innovation Incubator (Dii), achieved significant milestones. Led by Boyan Zhang (Class of 2026, undergraduate majoring in Computer Science and Design/Computational Design), the team presented their demo paper titled “Demo Abstract: Privacy-Preserving Room Occupancy Estimation Using Federated Analytics of BLE Packets” at ACM SenSys 2024, a premier international conference in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded sensing systems.
ACM SenSys (ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems) is one of the top-tier international academic conferences in IoT and embedded sensing and is ranked among the top three in mobile computing according to CS Rankings. The conference focuses on cutting-edge research related to the architecture, algorithms, platforms, and real-world applications of embedded and networked sensing systems.
The Edge-IoT project officially joined DKU’s Innovation Incubator in June 2024 under the mentorship of Professor Bing Luo from the Division of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). The second author of the demo paper, Shuhao Qin, a senior undergraduate student in Computer Science and Design at DKU, played a vital role in both the drafting of the paper and the early-stage project development.
This project aims to leverage Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to build a smarter campus network at Duke Kunshan University. It introduces a novel method that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals to estimate room occupancy in a privacy-preserving manner—accurately detecting the number of occupants without compromising individual data privacy.
