Projects

LOCATER explores the data cleaning challenges that arise in using WiFi connectivity data to locate users to semantic indoor locations such as buildings, regions, rooms. LOCATER, has been deployed in more than 30 buildings in 3 universities (UCI, BSU, Plaksha University in India) and an elderly living facility, Walnut Village, located in Orange County. The system, which has been in operation for over 3 years at UC, Irvine uses data cleaning technologies over WiFi events to locate people inside buildings. It is a practical solution to passive, server-side, indoor localization that leverages existing infrastructure (and hence has zero cost), yet it achieves roughly 85% accuracy which is similar to that achieved by expensive dedicated hardware based solutions available commercially today. See our demo for one location-based application, occupancy, which is built using LOCATER.

LOCATER

EnrichDB is a system designed to support just-in-time data enrichment during query processing. EnrichDB is motivated by applications that consume (potentially large volumes of) raw data that must first be interpreted using expensive machine learning / signal processing functions prior to being queried/used in analysis. Executing such enrichment during data ingestion (to support real-time analytics) is challenging to scale specially when dataset can be very large and/or when data arrives at a high velocity. EnrichDB addresses this challenge by supporting enrichment at all phases of data processing including intermixing enrichment with query processing. It exploits query context to steer enrichment in ways such that the query results can be computed progressively. EnrichDB is implemented using a layered approach on top of PostgreSQL, though it can easily be layered on other databases.

EnrichDB

T-COVE is an exposure tracing and occupancy system based on cleaning wi-fi events on organizational premises. It first supports a real-time occupancy tracking application that displays real-time occupancy, i.e., the number of users, of locations of different granularities, such as building/floor/region. T-COVE has been deployed in over 30 buildings in UCI and BSU campuses and has been running since 2020. T-COVE will be planned to be installed in several other campuses and companies in the future. Another application supported in T-COVE is a passive exposure tracing system with potentially 100% adoption in campus area, that could be used effectively to track exposures as one of COVID-19 protection polycies in UCI. T-COVE is passive and off-the-shelf without the needs to install any new hardware or software while achieving a very usable accuracy, around 90%.

T-COVE