Guohao Lan, Ph.D.

I am a tenured Assistant Professor (I know, see this) in the Embedded Systems Group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. My research interests are in the intersection of pervasive systems and machine learning. Specifically, my research explores how to augment the environment and human body with smart cyber-physical systems that can sense, communicate, and learn, to enhance human capabilities in comprehension, perception, and decision-making — a vision I refer to as `Pervasive Augmented Intelligence'.

Before joining TU Delft, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, working with Maria Gorlatova. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in November 2018, where I worked under the supervision of Mahbub Hassan and Wen Hu. I was also a member of the Networks Research Group at Data61-CSIRO. Prior to my Ph.D., I obtained my M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from KAIST, Korea, in February 2015 under the supervision of Myungchul Kim.

If you are looking for a PhD/Postdoc position or MSc project in my group, please read this first.

News

• [2025/3/31] Invited to serve on the TPC of NDSS 2026.
• [2025/2/25] Our paper entitled ``SecureGaze: Defending Gaze Estimation Against Backdoor Attacks'' has been accepted to appear in ACM SenSys 2025. This is the first work that demonstrates and mitigates the backdoor vulnerability of gaze estimation models. A physical-world demonstration and the associated implementation can be found in the project repository.
• [2024/11/8] Invited to serve on the TPC of SenSys 2025 and MobiSys 2025.
• [2024/11/1] Starting to serve as an Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (PACM IMWUT).
• [2024/9/30] Our paper entitled ``SEESys: Online Pose Error Estimation System for Visual SLAM'' has been accepted to appear in ACM SenSys 2024.
• [2024/8/5] Our paper entitled ``PrivateGaze: Preserving User Privacy in Black-box Mobile Gaze Tracking Services'' has been accepted to appear in ACM IMWUT 2024.
• [2024/8/5] Our paper entitled ``REHSense: Towards Battery-Free Wireless Sensing via Radio Frequency Energy Harvesting'' has been accepted to appear in ACM MobiHoc 2024.
• [2024/8/5] Our paper entitled ``Leveraging Foundation Models for Zero-Shot IoT Sensing'' has been accepted to appear in ECAI 2024.
• [2023/9/23] Our paper entitled ``EV-Eye: Rethinking High-frequency Eye Tracking through the Lenses of Event Cameras'' has been accepted to appear in NeurIPS 2023.
• [2023/9/2] Our paper entitled ``Screen Perturbation: Adversarial Attack and Defense on Under-Screen Camera'' has been accepted to appear in ACM MobiCom 2023.
• [2023/7/18] Our paper entitled ``FreeGaze: Resource-efficient Gaze Estimation via Frequency-domain Contrastive Learning'' has been accepted to appear in EWSN 2023.
• [2023/6/22] Our paper entitled ``SolarKey: Battery-free Key Generation using Solar Cells'' has been accepted to appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.
• [2023/3/20] Our EMGSense paper received the Mark Weiser Best Paper Award at IEEE PerCom 2023.
• [2022/12/21] Our paper entitled ``EMGSense: A Low-Effort Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation Framework for EMG Sensing'' has been accepted to appear in IEEE PerCom 2023.
• [2022/9/18] Our paper entitled ``Eavesdropping Mobile App Activity via Radio-frequency Energy Harvesting'' has been accepted to appear in USENIX Security 2023.
• [2022/4/22] We are organizing the 1th ACM Workshop on Smart Wearable Systems and Applications (in conjunction with ACM MobiCom'22). Please consider sharing your great work with us.
• [2022/2/19] Our paper entitled ``EyeSyn: Psychology-inspired Eye Movement Synthesis for Gaze-based Activity Recognition'' has been accepted to appear in ACM/IEEE IPSN 2022.
• [2022/1/25] Our paper entitled ``Recognizing Hand Gestures using Solar Cells'' has been accepted to appear in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.
• [2022/1/10] Our ongoing work and vision on privacy-preserving eye tracking for AR/VR are mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article "Come the Metaverse, Can Privacy Exist?".
• [2021/9/30] Received the Facebook Research Award with Xucong Zhang to design privacy-preserving eye tracking for AR/VR and beyond. Thank you Facebook!

Awards and Honors

• Mark Weiser Best Paper Award, IEEE PerCom 2023.
• Facebook Research Award, 2021. [Link]
• Best Research Artifact Award, ACM/IEEE IPSN 2020. [Link]
• Nomination for Malcolm Chaikin Prize for Research Excellence in Engineering, Falculty of Engineering, UNSW, 2019. [Single nomination from the School of Computer Science & Engineering]
• Best Demo Runner-up Award, ACM/IEEE IoTDI 2018. [Link]
• IEEE TCPP Student Travel Award, IEEE PerCom 2018. [Link]
• National Research & Development Project of the Year (Merit Recipient), Australian Information Industry Association, 2017. [Link]
• New South Wales State Research & Development Project of the Year (Winner), Australian Information Industry Association, 2017.
• New South Wales State Mobility Innovation of the Year (Winner), Australian Information Industry Association, 2017.
• First Prize in Postgraduate Student Paper Competition, IEEE Australia Council, 2016. [Link]
• Best Ph.D. Forum Paper Award, IEEE PerCom 2017. [Link]
• IEEE TCCC Student Travel Award, IEEE PerCom 2017.
• Postgraduate Research Support Scheme Conference Travel Award, UNSW, 2017.
• Runner-up in IT Technical Innovation, NASSCOM Australia, 2017. [Link]
• Best Work-in-Progress Paper Award, IEEE PerCom 2016. [Link]

Publications Full List in Google Scholar »

Names underlined are students who worked directly with me.

Journal and Magazine

1. UbiComp'24 "PrivateGaze: Preserving user privacy in black-box mobile gaze tracking services"
   Lingyu Du, Jinyuan Jia, Xucong Zhang, and Guohao Lan
   Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 2024.
   (CORE Rank A*) [Code repository]
2. ACM TOSN "SolarKey: Battery-free key generation using solar cells"
   Bo Wei, Weitao Xu, Mingcen Gao, Guohao Lan, Kai Li, Chengwen Luo, and Jin Zhang
   ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2023.
3. IEEE TMC "Recognizing hand gestures using solar cells"
   Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Changshuo Hu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, Mushfika Upama, Ashraf Uddin, and Moustafa Youssef
   IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2022.
4. IEEE IOT-J "Enhancing kinetic energy harvesting-based human activity recognition with deep learning and data augmentation"
   Jose Manjarres, Guohao Lan, Maria Gorlatova, Mahbub Hassan, and Mauricio Pardoa
   IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2021.
5. IEEE IOT-J "PrivGait: An energy harvesting-based privacy-preserving gait identification system for smart space"
   Weitao Xu, Wanli Xue, Qi Lin, Guohao Lan, Xingyu Feng, Bo Wei, Chengwen Luo, Wei Li, and Albert Y. Zomaya
   IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2021.
6. ACM TOSN "Edge-assisted collaborative image recognition for mobile augmented reality"
   Guohao Lan, Zida Liu, Yunfan Zhang, Timothy Scargill, Jovan Stojkovic, Carlee Joe-Wong, and Maria Gorlatova
   ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2021 [Dataset repository]
7. IEEE IOT-J "MetaSense: Boosting RF sensing accuracy using dynamic metasurface antenna"
   Guohao Lan, Mohammadreza F. Imani, Zida Liu, Jose Manjarres, Wenjun Hu, Andrew S. Lan, David R. Smith, and Maria Gorlatova
   IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2021.
8. UbiComp'20 "KEHKey: Kinetic energy harvester-based authentication and key generation for body area network"
   Qi Lin, Weitao Xu, Guohao Lan, Hong Jia, Yesheng Cui, Wen Hu, Mahbub Hassan, and Aruna Seneviratne
   Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 2020.
   (CORE Rank A*)
9. IEEE TMC "Simultaneous energy harvesting and gait recognition using piezoelectric energy harvester"
   Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
   IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2020.
10. IEEE TMC "Towards a compressive-sensing-based lightweight encryption scheme for the Internet of Things"
    Wanli Xue, Chengwen Luo, Yiran Shen, Rajib Rana, Guohao Lan, Sanjay Jha, Aruna Seneviratne, and Wen Hu
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2020.
11. IEEE COMMAG "Wireless sensing using dynamic metasurface antennas: Challenges and opportunities"
    Guohao Lan, Mohammadreza F. Imani, Philipp del Hougne, Wenjun Hu, David R. Smith, and Maria Gorlatova
    IEEE Communications Magazine, 2020.
12. ACM TIOT "Capacitor based activity sensing for kinetic powered wearable IoTs"
    Guohao Lan, Dong Ma, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
    ACM Transactions on Internet of Things, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-26, 2020
13. IEEE COMST "Sensing, computing, and communication for energy harvesting IoTs: A survey"
    Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, and Sajal K. Das
    IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. x, no. x, pp. xx, 2019
14. IEEE T-ITS "EnTrans: Leveraging energy harvesting signal for transportation mode detection"
    Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Dong Ma, Sara Khalifa, Mahbub Hassan and Wen Hu
    IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. x, no. x, pp. xx, 2019
15. IEEE TMC "KEH-Gait: Using kinetic energy harvesting for gait-based user authentication systems"
    Weitao Xu, Guohao Lan, Qi Lin, Sara Khalifa, Mahbub Hassan, Neil Bergmann, and Wen Hu
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 139-152, 2019.
16. IEEE Computer "Kinetic-powered wearable IoT for healthcare: Challenges and opportunities"
    Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, Guohao Lan, Sara Khalifa, Aruna Seneviratne, and Sajal K. Das
    IEEE Computer, vol. 51, no. 9, pp. 64-74, 2018.
17. IEEE TMC "HARKE: Human activity recognition from kinetic energy harvesting data in wearable devices"
    Sara Khalifa, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Aruna Seneviratne, and Sajal K. Das
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 1353-1368, 2018.
18. IEEE COMST "A survey of wearable devices and challenges"
    Suranga Seneviratne, Yining Hu, Thi Tham Nguyen, Guohao Lan, Sara Khalifa, Kanchana Thilakarathna, Mahbub Hassan, and Aruna Seneviratne
    IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 2573-2620, 2017.

Conference Proceedings

1. SenSys'25 "SecureGaze: Defending gaze estimation against backdoor attacks"
   Lingyu Du, Yupei Liu, Jinyuan Jia, and Guohao Lan
   Proceedings of the 23nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2025.
   [To appear] (Acceptance rate: 46/245=18.8%, CORE Rank A*) [Project repository]
2. SenSys'24 "SEESys: Online pose error estimation system for visual SLAM"
   Tianyi Hu, Tim Scargill, Ying Chen, Fan Yang, Guohao Lan, and Maria Gorlatova
   Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2024.
   (Acceptance rate: 58/313=18.5%, CORE Rank A*) [Project repository]
3. ECAI'24 "Leveraging Foundation Models for Zero-shot IoT Sensing"
   Dinghao Xue, Xiaoran Fan, Tao Chen, Guohao Lan, and Qun Song
   Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024.
   (Acceptance rate: 547/2344=23.3%, CORE Rank A)
4. MobiHoc'24 "REHSense: Towards battery-free wireless sensing via radio frequency energy harvesting"
   Tao Ni, Tao Ni, Zehua Sun, Mingda Han, Guohao Lan, Yaxiong Xie, Zhenjiang Li, Tao Gu, and Weitao Xu
   Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing, 2024.
   (Acceptance rate: 38/155=24.5%, CORE Rank A)
5. NeurIPS'23 "EV-Eye: Rethinking high-frequency eye tracking through the lenses of event cameras"
   Guangrong Zhao, Yurun Yang, Jingwei Liu, Ning Chen, Yiran Shen, Hongkai Wen, and Guohao Lan
   Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023.
   (Acceptance rate: 322/987=32.7%, CORE Rank A*)
6. MobiCom'23 "Screen perturbation: Adversarial attack and defense on under-screen camera"
   Hanting Ye, Guohao Lan, Jinyuan Jia, and Qing Wang
   Proceedings of the 29th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking, 2023.
   (Acceptance rate: 92/377=24%, CORE Rank A*)
7. EWSN'23 "FreeGaze: Resource-efficient gaze estimation via frequency-domain contrastive learning"
   Lingyu Du, and Guohao Lan
   Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks, 2023.
   (Acceptance rate: 19/53=35%, CORE Rank B) [Code repository]
8. PerCom'23 "EMGSense: A low-effort self-supervised domain adaptation framework for EMG sensing"
   Di Duan, Huanqi Yang, Guohao Lan, Tianxing Li, Xiaohua Jia, and Weitao Xu
   Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2023.
   (Acceptance rate: 27/159=17%, CORE Rank A*, Mark Weiser Best Paper Award)
9. Security'23 "Eavesdropping mobile app activity via radio-frequency energy harvesting"
   Tao Ni, Guohao Lan, Jia Wang, Qingchuan Zhao, and Weitao Xu
   Proceedings of the 32nd on USENIX Security Symposium (Security), 2023.
   (CORE Rank A*)
10. IPSN'22 "EyeSyn: Psychology-inspired eye movement synthesis for gaze-based activity recognition"
    Guohao Lan, Tim Scargill, and Maria Gorlatova
    Proceedings of the 21th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2022.
    (Acceptance rate: 38/126=30%, CORE Rank A*) [Code and dataset repository]
11. SenSys'20 "GazeGraph: Graph-based few-shot cognitive context sensing from human visual behavior"
    Guohao Lan, Bailey Heit, Tim Scargill, and Maria Gorlatova
    Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2020.
    (Acceptance rate: 43/213=20%, CORE Rank A*) [Dataset repository]
12. IPSN'20 "CollabAR: Edge-assisted collaborative image recognition for mobile augmented reality"
    Zida Liu, Guohao Lan, Jovan Stojkovic, Yunfan Zhang, Carlee Joe-Wong, and Maria Gorlatova
    Proceedings of the 19th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2020.
    (Acceptance rate: 27/122=22%, CORE Rank A*, Best Research Artifact Award) [Dataset repository]
13. MobiCom'19 "SolarGest: Ubiquitous and battery-free gesture recognition using solar cells"
    Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, Mushfika Baishakhi Upama, Ashraf Uddin, and Moustafa Youssef
    Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2019.
    (Acceptance rate: 55/290=18%, CORE Rank A*)
14. IoTDI'18 "SEHS: Simultaneous energy harvesting and sensing using piezoelectric energy harvester"
    Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
    Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation, 2018.
    (Acceptance rate: 21/89=23%)
15. PerCom'18 "HiddenCode: Hidden acoustic signal capture with vibration energy harvesting"
    Guohao Lan, Dong Ma, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
    Proceedings of the 16th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2018.
    (Acceptance rate: 23/157=13%, CORE Rank A*)
16. MobiQuitous'17 "CapSense: Capacitor-based activity sensing for kinetic energy harvesting powered wearable devices"
    Guohao Lan, Dong Ma, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
    Proceedings of the 14th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, 2017. (CORE Rank A)
17. IPSN'17 "Kryptein: A compressive-sensing-based encryption scheme for the Internet of Things"
    Wanli Xue, Chengwen Luo, Guohao Lan, Rajib Rana, Wen Hu and Aruna Seneviratne
    Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2017.
    (Acceptance rate: 19/104=18%, CORE Rank A*)
18. PerCom'17 "VEH-COM: Demodulating vibration energy harvesting for short range communication"
    Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Sara Khalifa, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
    Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2017.
    (Acceptance rate: 28/194=14%, CORE Rank A*)
19. NDSS'17 "KEH-Gait: Towards a mobile healthcare user authentication system by kinetic energy harvesting"
    Weitao Xu, Guohao Lan, Qi Lin, Sara Khalifa, Neil Bergmann, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
    Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2017.
    (Acceptance rate: 68/423=16%, CORE Rank A*)
    Selected media coverage: ABC News, CSIRO News, IT News, The Conversation, Sina News, Sohu News, Tencent News
20. Networking'16 "AMONET: A method for detecting and mitigating the data rate degradation due to interference over wireless networks"
    Guohao Lan, Sangyup Han, Il-Gu Lee and Myungchul Kim
    Proceedings of the 15th IFIP Networking Conference, 2016.
    (Acceptance rate: 53/200=26.5%, CORE Rank A)
21. BodyNets'15 "Estimating calorie expenditure from output voltage of piezoelectric energy harvester: An experimental feasibility study"
    Guohao Lan, Sara Khalifa, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
    Proceedings of the 10th EAI International Conference on Body Area Networks, 2015.
    

Workshop Proceedings

1. SmartEdge'20 "Edge-based provisioning of holographic content for contextual and personalized augmented reality"
   Michael Glushakov, Yunfan Zhang, Yuqi Han, Timothy J. Scargill, Guohao Lan, and Maria Gorlatova
   Proceedings of 4th International Workshop on Smart Edge Computing and Networking, 2020.
   (Invited paper)
2. WiNTECH'18 "Gesture recognition with transparent solar cells: A feasibility study"
   Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, Mushfika Baishakhi Upama, Ashraf Uddin, and Moustafa Youssef
   Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation & Characterization, 2018.
   
3. PerCom'16 WiP "Transportation mode detection using kinetic energy harvesting wearables"
   Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Sara Khalifa, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
   Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, Work-in-Progress, 2016.
   (Best WiP Poster Award + Featured in IEEE Xplore Innovation Spotlight)
4. CoMoRea'16 "A bayesian framework for energy-neutral activity monitoring with self-powered wearable sensors"
   Sara Khalifa, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
   Proceedings of the 12th IEEE PerCom Workshop on Context and Activity Modeling and Recognition, 2016.
   (Invited paper)

Poster and Demo

1. SenSys'19 "Demo abstract: Edge-assisted collaborative image recognition for augmented reality"
   Jovan Stojkovic, Zida Liu, Guohao Lan, Carlee Joe-Wong, and Maria Gorlatova
   Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2017.
   
2. IoTDI'18 "Demo abstract: SEHS: simultaneous energy harvesting and sensing using piezoelectric energy harvester"
   Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
   Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation, 2018.
   (Best Demo Runner-up Award)
3. MobiQuitous'17 "Unobtrusive user verification using piezoelectric energy harvesting"
   Dong Ma, Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu
   Proceedings of the 14th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, 2017.
   
4. PerCom'17 "Energy-efficient acoustic communication using vibration energy harvesting"
   Guohao Lan
   Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, PhD Forum, 2017.
   (Best PhD Forum Paper Award)

Book Chapters

1. "Gait-based smart pairing system for personal wearable devices"
   Weitao Xu, and Guohao Lan
   Book chapter in "Medical Internet of Things (m-IoT)- Enabling technologies and emerging applications", 2019.
   
2. "Human context detection from kinetic energy harvesting wearables"
   Sara Khalifa, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, and Aruna Seneviatne
   Book chapter in "Examining developments and applications of wearable devices in modern society", 2018.