For the third Distinguished Lecture this Summer, emergenCITY and MAKI could win Professor Francesco Gringoli from the University of Brescia, Italy. We are looking forward to his talk on “Controllable Accuracy in Wireless Sensing: Achieving Optimal Performance through Physical Layer Signal Obfuscation” on June 25, 2024 at 16:30:

  • Date: Tuesday, 25.06.2024, 16:30 p.m.
  • Speaker: Prof. Francesco Gringoli, University of Brescia, Italy
  • Title: “Controllable Accuracy in Wireless Sensing: Achieving Optimal Performance through Physical Layer Signal Obfuscation”
  • Venue: S2/20 room 09-10 and online via Zoom
About the lecture:

Thanks to the ubiquitous deployment of Wi-Fi hotspots, channel state information (CSI)-based Wi-Fi sensing can unleash game-changing applications in many fields, such as healthcare, security, and entertainment. At the same time, this technology represents an unprecedented threat to people’s privacy, as personal information can be collected directly at the physical layer without any possibility to hide or protect it. In this presentation, we will first explore the extent to which sensing accuracy can advance in the analysis of heterogeneous environments and the classification of the activities of the individuals involved. To this end we will try to understand the impact on CSI-based sensing of modern Wi-Fi features, such as 160-MHz bandwidth, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmissions, and increased spectral resolution in IEEE 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) when AI techniques are used for analyzing a huge labelled dataset that contains almost two hours of CSI data from three collectors captured across different environments and individuals. We will then consider mechanisms specifically designed to counter such accuracy and restore the privacy of the people that are exposed to sensing without being aware of it. We will introduce physical layer techniques that we recently proposed to thwart wireless sensing by obfuscating the transmitted signals in a way that appears unpredictable to unauthorized sensing receivers. We will finally discuss the possibility to implement deobfuscation subsystems that can invert the obfuscation and restore sensing capabilities at legitimate receivers.

Speaker’s Bio:

Francesco Gringoli is Full Professor at the University of Brescia, Italy. He received the master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1998 and the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Brescia, Italy, in 2002. His research interests include security assessment, performance evaluation and medium access control in Wireless LANs.