SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures
Kuang Yuan, Yifeng Wang, Xiyuxing Zhang, Chengyi Shen, Swarun Kumar, Justin Chan.
[Preprint]
Kuang Yuan
I'm currently a 4th-year Ph.D. student of WiTech Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. My advisor is Prof. Swarun Kumar and I also work closely with Prof. Justin Chan. I'm a recipient of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2021 with the Guo Moruo Scholarship (The highest honor for USTC students).
My research interests lie in developing intelligent audio systems and sensing technologies, to promote human well-being in everyday life and support seamless human-computer interfaces. I design and build mobile systems which integrates sensors (acoustics, radar, IMU, etc.), real-time signal processing, and machine learning algorithms.
I'm a Research Scientist Intern at Meta Reality Labs during 2024 and 2025 summer working on audio technologies on smart glasses. I'm also fortunate to work with Prof. Jie Xiong during my undergrad years and the 2023 summer internship at Microsoft Research Asia.
News
- June 2025: ToMoBrush won the Best Demo Award at MobiSys'24.
- May 2025: I and my teammate Jiangyifei Zhu received the 2025 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship as one of the top 17 recipients out of 266 teams [CMU News].
- May 2025: Started my second internship at Meta Reality Labs (XR Sonic Algorithms team).
- Apr. 2025: Our paper WindDancer was accepted to ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp'25).
- Feb. 2025: Received the Bradford and Diane Smith Graduate Fellowship in Engineering.
- Nov. 2024: ToMoBrush received extensive media coverage from international dental press [Full list].
- Oct. 2024: WheelPoser won the Best Student Paper Award at ACM ASSETS'24.
- Oct. 2024: Presented ToMoBrush at the Ubicomp'24 in Melbourne, Australia.
- Sep. 2024: Presented DeWinder at the Interspeech'24 in Kos, Greece.
Publications
WindDancer: Understanding Acoustic Sensing under Ambient Airflow
Kuang Yuan, Dong Li, Hao Zhou, Zhehao Li, Lili Qiu, Swarun Kumar, Jie Xiong.
ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp'25)
[Paper]
ToMoBrush: Exploring Dental Health Sensing Using a Sonic Toothbrush
Kuang Yuan, Mohamed Ibrahim, Yiwen Song, Guoxiang Deng, Suvendra Vijayan, Robert Nerone, Akshay Gadre, Swarun Kumar.
ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp'24)
[Paper] [Talk] [Teaser & Demo]
Press:
CMU,
Medical Xpress,
Bite Magazine,
Panda Oral,
Dental Tribune,
O Jornal Dentistry,
ZWP Online,
OTSZ Online,
Melton Dental,
Hi-Tech Mail,
Health of Ukraine,
Postimees,
网易,
21dB声学人
Best Demo Award (MobiSys'24)
DeWinder: Single-Channel Wind Noise Reduction using Ultrasound Sensing
Kuang Yuan*, Shuo Han*, Swarun Kumar, Bhiksha Raj. (*Co-primary Author)
Interspeech'24
[Paper] [Poster]
WheelPoser: Sparse-IMU Based Body Pose Estimation for Wheelchair Users
Yunzhi Li, Vimal Mollyn, Kuang Yuan, Patrick Carrington.
ACM ASSETS'24
[Paper] [Teaser & Demo] [Code & Dataset]
Press:
CMU News,
映维网
Best Student Paper Award
Rethinking Orientation Estimation with Smartphone-equipped Ultra-wideband Chips
Hao Zhou, Kuang Yuan, Mahanth Gowda, Lili Qiu, Jie Xiong.
ACM MobiCom'24
[Paper]
Towards Ubiquitous IoT through Long Range Wireless Energy Harvesting
Mohamed Ibrahim, Atul Bansal, Kuang Yuan, Junbo Zhang, Swarun Kumar.
ACM MobiHoc'24
[Paper]
Battery-free Wideband Spectrum Mapping using Commodity RFID Tags
Mohamed Ibrahim, Atul Bansal, Kuang Yuan, Swarun Kumar, Peter Steenkiste.
ACM MobiCom'23
[Paper]
Exploring Time-series Telemetry from CubeSats
Kuang Yuan, Akshay Gadre, Swarun Kumar.
ACM SenSys'22 (Poster Abstract)
[Paper] [Poster]
EarphoneTrack: Involving Earphones into the Ecosystem of Acoustic Motion Tracking
Gaoshuai Cao*, Kuang Yuan*, Jie Xiong, Panlong Yang, Yubo Yan, Hao Zhou, and Xiang-Yang Li. (*Co-primary Author)
ACM SenSys'20
[Paper] [Talk] [Slides]