Xinghua Sun (孙兴华)

ECE Ph.D. candidate at University of Washington

xinghua_about_20250105.jpg

Hi👋! I am currently a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate at University of Washington in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I am a member of the Networking and Emerging Wireless Technologies Lab (NEWT), working on wireless and mobile systems under the supervision of Prof. Akshay Gadre.

I am passionate about building systems that solve exciting and impactful real-world challenges, and my work aims to push the boundaries of wireless sensing through innovative system design. Currently, my research focuses on practical mmWave sensing and imaging systems, building distributed and coherent radar systems that achieve high-fidelity imaging (MulDar) and enable new sensing capabilities (POLySight) on commodity hardware.

Prior to PhD, I received my Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University (2022) working with Prof. Fred Jiang at Intelligent and Connected Systems Lab (ICSL) on embedded AI and Robotics. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Automation Science and Engineering from South China University of Technology (2021).

News

May 11, 2026 I will be presenting POLySight and demoing MulDar on May 12th in Saint-Malo at SenSys, come by if you are around!
Apr 25, 2026 Selected as MobiSys Rising Star 2026 🌟! I will give a remote oral presentation on Towards Practical mmWave Sensing: A Distributed and Coherent Radar Approach.
Apr 20, 2026 I will attend the CPS-IoT PhD Forum in Saint-Malo and present on May 11th.
Apr 06, 2026 Our papers MulDar: Unleashing the Potential of Distributed COTS mmWave Radar by Exploiting Cross-Device Channels and TwinFocus: Autofocus for Handheld mmWave SAR Imaging via Physical and Digital Twin References have been accepted to ACM MobiSys 2026! 🎉
Mar 05, 2026 I will join the NVIDIA XR team as an intern this summer, working on robotics and spatial AI!
Sep 21, 2025 Our paper POLySight: Towards Practical Bi-Static Polarimetric Imaging using Commodity mmWave Radars for Material Sensing has been accepted to ACM/IEEE SenSys 2026! 🎉
Jun 02, 2025 Passed my PhD Qualification Exam.
Mar 12, 2025 Won the Best Demo Award (sponsored by Apple) at the UW ECE Research Showcase 2025.
Nov 18, 2024 We will be presenting a Demo and a Workshop paper at Mobicom 2024 in Washington, D.C.
Jun 11, 2024 We have presented our work RayTrack at T-Mobile’s headquarter in Bonn, Germany. And won the T-Mobile Challenge Most Engaging Presentation Award 2024.

Publications

  2. TwinFocus: Autofocus for Handheld mmWave SAR Imaging via Physical and Digital Twin References
    Yadong Li, Xinghua Sun , Qiancheng Li, and Akshay Gadre
    MobiSys, 2026
    Video Code Dataset PDF DOI
    twinfocus-1400.webp
  3. polysight_0.png
  4. Demo: "My WiFi is not working!" Augmenting Wireless Awareness in Consumers via XR
    Workshop: Synthetic Data for Data-Driven Wireless
    Qiancheng Li, Xinghua Sun, and Akshay Gadre
    MobiCom Demo, S3 Workshop, MobiCom 1st Open and AI RAN Workshop, 2024
    DOI
    raytrack_combined.gif
  5. Demo: AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Assessment and Intervention Using Smart Home Devices
    Jingping Nie, Minghui Zhao, Stephen Xia, Xinghua Sun, Hanya Shao, Yuang Fan, Matthias Preindl, and Xiaofan Jiang
    Sensys, 2022
    Best Demo Runner-up DOI
  6. How Tiny Can Analog Filterbank Features Be Made for Ultra-low-power On-device Keyword Spotting?
    Subhajit Ray, Xinghua Sun, Nolan Tremelling, Maria Gordiyenko, and Peter Kinget
    TinyML Research Symposium, 2023
    arXiv Video
    tinyml.png

Awards

Services

  • Invited Reviewer for ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare (HEALTH)
  • Teaching Assistant - UW EE 497/598 Engineering Entrepreneurial Capstone (Winter 2026, Autumn 2026)
  • Teaching Assistant - UW EE 419/565 Computer Communication Networks (Spring 2025)
  • Teaching Assistant - UW EE 417/506 Modern Wireless Communications (Winter 2025)
  • Teaching Assistant - UW EE 215 Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering (Winter 2024)