Towards Ubiquitous IoT Sensing: From Low-Cost Devices to Highly- Generalizable Models

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "Towards Ubiquitous IoT Sensing: From Low-Cost Devices to Highly-
Generalizable Models"

By

Mr. Yinan ZHU


Abstract:

Internet of Things (IoT) sensing has enabled numerous smart applications, 
yet still fails to reach full ubiquity, due to two core challenges: (i) 
Cost: precise sensing always relies on expensive professional devices, 
impeding large-scale deployment, while commercial low-cost devices have 
limited sensing granularity; (ii) Generalizability: cross-domain 
adaptability is severely hindered by complex domain shifts, such as device 
deployment and environmental gaps. This thesis addresses these two 
challenges on five typical applications, with innovative research attempts. 
The first two attempts develop algorithms to enhance the resolutions of 
low-cost sensors: layout features utilization for radio-frequency 
identification tag groups and task-oriented spectral reconstruction for 
multispectral cameras, thus succeeding high-cost sensors. The next two 
attempts explore feature-wise optimization for dataset-level domain 
generalization: feature distribution alignment with source-resemble 
target-domain data selection and domain- invariant semantic-related feature 
extraction with large multimodal models. The last work performs cross-domain 
feature alignment for low-cost multispectral data, synergizing two prongs. 
Overall, our attempts advance IoT sensing ubiquity with notable cost 
reduction and generalizability gain.


Date:                   Thursday, 8 January 2026

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3494
                        Lifts 25/26

Chairman:               Prof. Jianzhen YU (CHEM)

Committee Members:      Prof. Qian ZHANG (Supervisor)
                        Prof. Song GUO
                        Prof. Mo LI
                        Dr. Qijia SHAO (ISD)
                        Dr. Yuanqing ZHENG (PolyU)