Dr. Xiaoran "Van" Fan

Research Scientist

Google

Health Sensing and Insights

Ph.D. (2020): WINLAB, Rutgers University

Email: vanxf AT google.com

 

Passion

Curiosity

Grit and Determination

 

Welcome to my old-school early 90s-style website. I am a Senior Research Scientist at Google. I am working on building novel health and safety features for the consumer hardware lines at Google (Pixel phone, watch, buds). I am an experimentalist and system builder. I am enthusiastic about real-world-experiment-driven research. Also, I value incentives of research as important as techniques. I like methods that are simple but effective. Most of my research works eventually run in real-time, turn into patents, and become startup companies.

I also enjoy teaching, you can find feedback for my teaching from my students here. I am a long-standing guest lecturer on the topic of Acoustic Sensing in the EE227 (Robot Perception) course at Stanford University.

 

SELECTED AWARDS

Best Paper Award Runner-Up (Top 2 out of all submissions), ACM MobiCom 2021
Best Paper Award (Bronze Medal), Samsung and IEEE IROS 2021
Best Research Paper Award, Kinova and IEEE IROS 2020
Best Presentation Award, ACM MobiSys 2019
Best-in-Session Presentation Award, IEEE INFOCOM 2018
SigMobile Research Highlights, SigMobile 2022
GetMobile Research Highlights, GetMobile 2022
Samsung A1 Grade Patent Award (2022), Samsung
Samsung A1 Grade Patent Award (The first one in 2021), Samsung
Samsung A1 Grade Patent Award (The second one in 2021), Samsung
TA of the Year Award - Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rutgers University, 2018

MAIN PUBLICATIONS

Leveraging Foundation Models for Zero-Shot IoT Sensing
Dinghao Xue, Xiaoran Fan, Tao Chen, Guohao Lan, Qun Song.
ECAI 2024 - The 27th Euroupean Conference on Artificial Intellegence
 
See Through Vehicles: Fully Occluded Vehicle Detection with Millimeter Wave Radar
Chenming He, Chengzhen Meng, Chunwang He, Xiaoran Fan, Beibei Wang, Yubo Yan, Yanyong Zhang.
ACM MobiCom 2024 - The 30th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
 
RDGait: A mmWave Based Gait Recognition System for Complex Indoor Environments Using Single-chip Radar
Dequan Wang, Xinran Zhang, Kai Wang, Lingyu Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Yanyong Zhang.
ACM UbiComp 2024 - ACM International joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing
 
Exploring the Feasibility of Remote Cardiac Auscultation Using Earphones
Tao Chen, Yongjie Yang, Xiaoran Fan, Xiuzhen Guo, Jie Xiong, Longfei Shangguan.
ACM MobiCom 2024 - The 30th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
 
Enabling Hands-Free Voice Assistant Activation on Earphones
Tao Chen, Yongjie Yang, Chonghao Qiu, Xiaoran Fan, Xiuzhen Guo, Longfei Shangguan.
ACM MobiSys 2024 - The 22nd ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
 
mmPlace: Robust Place Recognition with Intermediate Frequency Signal of Low-cost Single-chip Millimeter Wave Radar
Chengzhen Meng, Yifan Duan, Chenming He, Dequan Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Yanyong Zhang.
IEEE RA-L 2024 - Robotics and Automation Letters.
 
APG: Audioplethysmography for Cardiac Monitoring in Hearables
Xiaoran Fan, David Pearl, Richard Howard, Longfei Shangguan, Trausti Thormundsson.
ACM MobiCom 2023 - The 29th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
 
AmbiSense: Acoustic Field Based Blindspot-Free Proximity Detection and Bearing Estimation
Siddharth Rupavatharam*, Xiaoran Fan*, Caleb Escobedo, Daewon Lee, Lawrence Jackel, Richard Howard, Colin Prepscius, Daniel Lee, Volkan Isler.
*Equal Contributions.
IEEE IROS 2023 - International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
 
PoseKernelLifter: Metric Lifting of 3D Human Pose using Sound
Zhijian Yang, Xiaoran Fan, Volkan Isler, Hyun Soo Park.
Project Website
IEEE/CVF CVPR 2022 - Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
 
Enabling Low-Cost Full Surface Tactile Skin for Human Robot Interaction
Xiaoran Fan, Daewon Lee, Larry Jackel, Richard Howard, Daniel Lee, Volkan Isler.
IEEE RA-L 2022 - Robotics and Automation Letters.
IEEE ICRA 2022 - International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
 
AuraSense: Robot Collision Avoidance by Full Surface Proximity Detection
Xiaoran Fan, Riley Simmons-Edler, Daewon Lee, Larry Jackel, Richard Howard, Daniel Lee.
IEEE IROS 2021 - International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
Bronze Medal of Samsung Best Paper Award
Finalist of Samsung Best Paper Award (11 out of 1000+ submissions)
 
HeadFi: Bringing Intelligence to All Headphones
Xiaoran Fan, Longfei Shangguan, Siddharth Rupavatharam, Yanyong Zhang, Jie Xiong, Yunfei Ma, Richard Howard.
ACM MobiCom 2021 - The 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.
(Acceptance rate: 16.8%)
Best Paper Award Runner-Up (Top 2 out of all submissions)
SigMobile Research Highlights
 
Acoustic Collision Detection and Localization for Robot Manipulators
Xiaoran Fan, Daewon Lee, Yuan Chen, Colin Prepscius, Volkan Isler, Larry Jackel, Sebastian Seung, Daniel Lee.
IEEE IROS 2020 - International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
Best Research Paper by Kinova Research
 
Distributed Beamforming Based Wireless Power Transfer: Analysis and Realization
Xiaoran Fan, Han Ding, Yanyong Zhang, Wade Trappe, Zhu Han, Rich Howard.
IEEE TST 2020 - Tsinghua Science and Technology.
Invited Paper
 
Towards Flexible Wireless Charging for Medical Implants Using Distributed Antenna System
Xiaoran Fan, Longfei Shangguan, Richard Howard, Yanyong Zhang, Yao Peng, Jie Xiong, Yunfei Ma, Xiang-Yang Li.
ACM MobiCom 2020 - The 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.
(Acceptance rate: 16%)
 
Energy-Ball: Wireless Power Transfer for Batteryless Internet of Things through Distributed Beamforming
Xiaoran Fan, Han Ding, Sugang Li, Michael Sanzari, Yanyong Zhang, Wade Trappe, Zhu Han, Richard Howard.
ACM UbiComp 2018 - ACM International joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.
(Acceptance rate: 21%)
 
Secret-Focus: A Practical Physical Layer Secret Communication System by Perturbing Focused Phases in Distributed Beamforming
Xiaoran Fan, Zhijie Zhang, Wade Trappe, Yanyong Zhang, Richard Howard, Zhu Han.
IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - The 37th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.
(Acceptance rate: 19%)
Best-in-session Presentation Award
 
Auto++: Detecting Cars Using Embedded Microphones in Real-Time
Sugang Li, Xiaoran Fan, Yanyong Zhang, Wade Trappe, Janne Lindqvist, Richard Howard.
ACM UbiComp 2017 - ACM International joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.
(Acceptance rate: 23%)
 

THESIS, SHORT PAPERS, DEMOS, AND POSTERS

Design Earable Sensing Systems: Perspectives and Lessons Learned from Industry
Xiaoran Fan, Trausti Thormundsson.
ACM EarComp 2023 The 4th Internaltional Workshop on Earable Computing in Conjunction with UBICOMP 2023.
 
A New Design Paradigm for Enabling Smart Headphones
Xiaoran Fan, Longfei Shangguan, Siddharth Rupavatharam, Yanyong Zhang, Jie Xiong, Yunfei Ma, Richard Howard.
ACM GetMobile 2022: Mobile Computing and Communications
 
Energy Focusing through Distributed Beamforming in Internet of Things: Mechanisms and Applications
Xiaoran Fan.
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 2020 - PhD Thesis.
 
Multi-modal Dataset for Human Grasping
Alexis Burns, Xiaoran Fan, Jade Pinkenburg, Daewon Lee, Volkan Isler, Daniel Lee.
IEEE RO - MAN 2020 - The 29th International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication Workshop
 
New Methods for Non-Destructive Underground Fiber Localization using Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing Technology
Hansi Liu, Ming-Fang Huang, Yuheng Chen, Xiaoran Fan, Ting Wang, Marco Gruteser.
OECC 2020 - The 25th OptoElectronics and Communications Conference .
 
Facilitating the Deployment of Next Billion IoT Devices with Distributed Antenna Systems
Xiaoran Fan.
ACM MobiSyis 2019 - RisingStars Forum - The 17th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services.
Best Presentation Award
 
Enabling Concurrent IoT Transmissions in Distributed C-RAN
Xiaoran Fan, Zhenzhou Qi, Zhenhua Jia, Yanyong Zhang.
ACM SenSys 2018 - The 16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems.
 
A Practical Secret Communication System by Perturbing Focused Phases Among Distributed Transmitters
Xiaoran Fan, Zhijie Zhang, Wade Trappe, Yanyong Zhang, Richard Howard, Zhu Han.
IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - The 37th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.
 
Demo: A Practical Secret Communication System by Perturbing Focused Phases Among Distributed Transmitters
Xiaoran Fan, Zhijie Zhang, Wade Trappe, Yanyong Zhang, Richard Howard, Zhu Han.
IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - The 37th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.
 
Bo-ear: unsupervised car sound sensing and tracking using microphones on smartphones
Sugang Li, Xiaoran Fan, Yanyong Zhang, Wade Trappe, Janne Lindqvist, Richard Howard.
S3@MobiCom 2016: S3 Proceedings of the Eighth Wireless of the Students, by the Students, and for the Students Workshop.
 
Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
 

PATENTS

I have been credited with the primary invention of 19 of my 22 patents
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Steve Rui, Govind Kannan, Trausti Thormundsson
Feb 2024.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Patrick Amihood, Xiaoran Fan, Cody Wortham
Feb 2024.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Govind Kannan, Cody Wortham, Patrick Amihood, Trausti Thormundsson
Dec 2023.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Cody Wortham, Xiaoran Fan, Patrick Amihood
Nov 2023.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Trausti Thormundsson
Aug 2023.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Patrick Amihood
Aug 2023.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Trausti Thormundsson
May 2023.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Patrick Amihood
Feb 2023.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Jason Guss
Jan 2023.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Richard Howard, Trausti Thormundsson
Novemember 2022.
 
Google Classified Patent (releasing soon)
Xiaoran Fan, Richard Howard, David Pearl, Trausti Thormundsson
August 2022.
 
Audioplethysmography Calibration
Xiaoran Fan, Trausti Thormundsson
June 2022. WO2023240240A1.
 
Respiration Rate Sensing
Xiaoran Fan, Trausti Thormundsson
June 2022. WO2023240233A1.
 
Active Acoustic Sensing
Xiaoran Fan, Trausti Thormundsson
June 2022. US WO2023240224A1.
 
Metric 3D Human Pose Lifting by Listening Sounds
Zhijian Yang, Xiaoran Fan, Volkan Isler, Hyun Soo Park
April 2022. US 63/279,952.
 
Method and apparatus for proximity detection and proximity direction estimation
Xiaoran Fan, Siddharth Rupavatharam, Larry Jackel, Richard Howard, Daewon Lee, Volkan Isler, Daniel Lee
April 2022. US 63/330,989
Samsung A1 Grade Patent
 
Method and Apparatus For Estimating Touch Locations and Touch Pressures
Xiaoran Fan, Daewon Lee, Lawrence Jackel, Richard Howard, Daniel Lee, Volkan Isler
Oct 2021. 17/553,321
Samsung A1 Grade Patent
 
Method and Apparatus for Robot Collision Avoidance by Full Surface Proximity Detection
Xiaoran Fan, Riley Simmons-Edler, Daewon Lee, Lawrence Jackel, Richard Howard, Daniel Lee
Apr 2021. 63/155,126.
Samsung A1 Grade Patent
 
Smart Headphone System and Method
Xiaoran Fan, Rich Howard
May 2020. 63/029,016.
Licensed to fund a start up company - Ohmic
 
System and Method for Acoustic Collision Detection and Localization for Robot Manipulators
Xiaoran Fan, Dae Won Lee, Ibrahim Volkan Isler, Yuan Chen, Colin Prepscius, Lawrence Jackel, Sebastian Seung, Daniel Lee
Apr 2020. 17/084,257.
 
In-body Wireless Charging System
Xiaoran Fan, Rich Howard, Longfei Shangguan, Jie Xiong
Nov 2019. 62/938,051.
 
Safe Wireless Power Transfer and Secure Communication Through Distributed Phase Alignment
Xiaoran Fan, Yanyong Zhang, Wade Trappe, Rich Howard
Apr 2018. 17/045,368.
 

INVITED TALKS, LECTURES & PRESENTATIONS

Acoustic Sensing
- Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, March 2024 (In Person, Guest Lecturer).
 
Acoustic Sensing
- Peking University, Beijing, China, December 2022 (Virtual, Guest Lecturer).
 
Acoustic Sensing
- University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 2022 (Virtual, Guest Lecturer).
 
HeadFi: Bringing Intelligence to All Headphones
- ACM MobiCom 21, New Orleans, LA, March 2022.
 
Acoustic Sensing
- Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, March 2022 (Virtual, Guest Lecturer for the Robotics Course 4733-2022, Spring).
 
Playing with Signals for Fun (and Profit)
- Amazon Lab126, Sunnyvale, CA, USA, November 2021 (Virtual).
- Google Technology Directions Office (TDO), Mountain View, CA, USA, December 2021 (Virtual).
 
AuraSense: Robot Collision Avoidance by Full-Surface Proximity Detection
- IEEE IROS 21, Prague, Czech Republic, September 2021 (Virtual).
 
Full Surface Proximity and Tactile Skin for Robot Safety
- Samsung Best Paper Award Finalist, Seoul, South Korea, September 2021 (Virtual).
- Samsung Research America Power Plants, Mountain View, CA, USA, June 2021 (Virtual).
 
Toward Implementations of CoMP
- Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA, October 2020 (Virtual).
 
Towards Flexible Wireless Charging for Medical Implants Using Distributed Antenna System
- ACM MobiCom 20, London, UK, September 2020 (Virtual).
 
Acoustic Collision Detection and Localization for Robot Manipulators
- IEEE IROS 20, Las Vegas, USA, October 2020 (Virtual).
 
Facilitating the Deployment of Next Billion IoT Devices with Distributed Antenna Systems
- ACM MobiSyis 19, Seoul, South Korea, June 2019.
 
Large-scale Distributed Beamforming – Implementations, Applications and Future Directions
- Samsung AI Center New York, New York, NY, USA, May 2019.
 
Distributed Beamforming for Safer Wireless Power Transferring
- ACM UbiComp 18, Sinapore, October 2018.
 
Distributed Beamforming for PHY Layer Secret Communication
- IEEE INFOCOM 18, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 2018.
 

COMMUNITY SERVICES & PAPER REVIEWER

ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom, TPC 2022, 2025)
ACM International Workshop on Earable Computing (ACM EarComp, Co-Chair 2022, 2024, TPC 2023)
ACM International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (ACM HotMobile, Session Chair)
EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (EAI MobiQuitous, TPC 2022)
IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS, Track Co-Chair for Wireless Sensing & Mobile Computing Track 2022)
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC)
IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques (TMTT)
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)
IEEE Transactions on Networking (ToN)
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (ToSN)
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
The Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/UbiComp)
IEEE/ACM Conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE)
ACM International Conference on Systems for Built Environments (BuildSys)
IEEE 5G World Forum (WF-5G)
IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking (SECON)
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (ACM/IEEE IPSN)
(External) ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems (SenSys)
(External) USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI)
(External) ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT)
ACM International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN)
IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI)
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
Elsevier Smart Health

HOBBIES

I love classical music, listening as well as performing on the piano. I like Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Besides collecting great recordings in history, I also enjoy live classical music concerts at NJSO and NYPhil. As an engineer, I am interested in understanding and building the systems for reproducing music--e.g. speakers, amplifiers, turntables. It is this interest that led me to research in signal processing. Of particular interest is the exploration of older technologies, such as vacuum tube amplifiers or vinyl records, to better understand the appeal they have for some enthusiasts.

News!

Sep 2024

Our paper "See Through Vehicles: Fully Occluded Vehicle Detection with Millimeter Wave Radar" is accepted by MobiCom 2024.

August 2024

I am invited to serve as TPC for MobiCom 2025. Please consider submitting.

August 2024

Our paper "Leveraging Foundation Models for Zero-Shot IoT Sensing" is accepted by ECAI 2024.

July 2024

Our paper "RDGait: A mmWave Based Gait Recognition System for Complex Indoor Environments Using Single-chip Radar" is accepted by UbiComp/IMWUT 2024.

April 2024

I am invited to serve as the Co-Chair for ACM EarComp 2024. EarComp is a rising community for hearable technologies. Please considering submitting.

Mar 2024

I gave a guest lecture on Acoustic Sensing at Stanford EECS227 (Robot Perception).

Mar 2024

Our paper "Enabling Hands-Free Voice Assistant Activation on Earphones" is accepted by MobiSys 2024.

Mar 2024

Our paper "mmPlace: Robust Place Recognition with Intermediate Frequency Signal of Low-cost Single-chip Millimeter Wave Radar" is accepted by RA-L 2024.

Mar 2024

I chaired the Health session for ACM HotMobile 2024.

Feb 2024

2 hearable related patents are filed on Feb, 2024.

Jan 2024

Our paper "Exploring the Feasibility of Remote Cardiac Auscultation Using Earphones" is accepted by MobiCom 2024.

Dec 2023

1 hearable related patent is filed on Dec, 2023.

Nov 2023

1 hearable related patent is filed on Nov, 2023.

Oct 2023

APG is posted on Google Research Blog. More than 100+ international news outlets in multiple languages covered our APG work!.

Aug 2023

Our paper "APG: Audioplethysmography for Cardiac Monitoring in Hearables" is accepted by MobiCom 2023.

Aug 2023

I am invited to serve as TPC for ACM HotMobile 2024. HotMobile 2024 will be held at San Diego. Please considering submitting.

Aug 2023

2 hearable related patents are filed on Aug, 2023.

Aug 2023

Our paper "Design Earable Sensing Systems: Perspectives and Lessons Learned from Industry" has been accepted by ACM EarComp 2023!

July 2023

2 hearable related patents are filed on July, 2023.

June 2023

Our paper "AmbiSense: Acoustic Field Based Blindspot-Free Proximity Detection and Bearing Estimation" is accepted by IROS 2023.

June 2023

I am invited to serve as TPC for ACM EarComp 2023. EarComp is a rising community for hearable technologies. Please considering submitting.

May 2023

1 hearable related patent is filed on May, 2023.