Prof. Mo Li Received ACM SIGMOBILE Test of Time Paper Award

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Mo Li's co-authored paper titled "Precise Power Delay Profiling with Commodity WiFi" has earned him the ACM SIGMOBILE Test of Time Paper Award.

A Practical Path to High-Precision Wi-Fi Sensing

In this exceptional work, Prof. Li teamed up with his former students, Dr. Yaxiong Xie (now Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo) and Dr. Zhenjiang Li (now Professor at the City University of Hong Kong), to address a long-standing limitation of Wi-Fi sensing. A decade ago, the technology promised contactless and privacy-preserving monitoring, yet narrow 20/40 MHz channels produced only coarse profiles in multipath environments. Their paper overcame this barrier by coherently splicing measurements across multiple channels to synthesize a virtual wideband, delivering fine-grained channel state information on ordinary commodity devices. Through careful modelling and efficient compensation, the approach achieved high-precision results without specialized radios. The authors further released the Atheros CSI Tool, which democratized access to detailed CSI and has since catalyzed research worldwide.

About the Award

The SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time awards recognize papers that have had a sustained and significant impact in the SIGMOBILE community over at least a decade. The award recognizes that a paper's influence is often not fully apparent at the time of publication, and it can be best judged with the perspective of time.

All papers published at least 10 years ago in a SIGMOBILE venue are eligible for this award. In addition, papers published at least 10 years ago in other venues are also eligible if they have had an exceptional influence on the SIGMOBILE community. The papers are judged by their influence since publication. The award includes an honorarium for each paper to be split amongst the authors and an award certificate of recognition for each author. A public citation for award papers will be placed on the SIGMOBILE website.

Details about the award

Congratulations to Prof. Mo Li, Dr. Yaxiong Xie and Dr. Zhenjiang Li!