Kuang Yuan

I'm currently a 5th-year Ph.D. student of WiTech Lab and Semantic Signals 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 integrate sensors (acoustics, radar, IMU, etc.), real-time signal processing, and machine learning algorithms.

I'm a Research Scientist Intern at Meta Reality Labs during the summers of 2024 and 2025, 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

Selected Publications

Active noise cancellation on open-ear smart glasses

Kuang Yuan*, Freddy Yifei Liu*, Tong Xiao, Yiwen Song, Chengyi Shen, Saksham Bhutani, Justin Chan, Swarun Kumar (*Co-primary Author)
[Preprint]

Measuring multi-site pulse transit time with an AI-enabled mmWave radar

Jiangyifei Zhu*, Kuang Yuan*, Akarsh Prabhakara, Yunzhi Li, Gongwei Wang, Kelly Michaelsen, Justin Chan, Swarun Kumar (*Co-primary Author)
Nature Communications (To Appear)
[Preprint]

Lightweight and Generalizable Acoustic Scene Representations via Contrastive Fine-tuning and Distillation

Kuang Yuan, Yang Gao, Xilin Li, Xinhao Mei, Syavosh Zadissa, Tarun Pruthi, Saeed Bagheri Sereshki
IEEE ICASSP'26 (To Appear)
[Paper]

Towards Seeing Bones at Radio Frequency

Yiwen Song, Hongyang Li, Kuang Yuan, Ran Bi, Swarun Kumar
MobiSys'26 (To Appear)
[Paper]

SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures

Kuang Yuan*, Yifeng Wang*, Xiyuxing Zhang*, Chengyi Shen, Swarun Kumar, Justin Chan (*Co-primary Author)
ACM CHI'26
[Paper] [Video] [Talk]
Press: CMU

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] [Code]

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] [Video] [Talk]
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'25)    New Quality Design Bronze Award (新质点设计奖铜奖)

DeWinder: Single-Channel Wind Noise Reduction using Ultrasound Sensing

Kuang Yuan*, Shuo Han*, Swarun Kumar, Bhiksha Raj (*Co-primary Author)
Interspeech'24
[Paper] [Poster]

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]

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]

Awards