Zikang Leng
I am a first year CS PhD student with the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. I am advised by Prof. Thomas Ploetz. My research is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
I obtained my Bachelor’s degree from Georgia Tech in May 2024, where my thesis focused on generating synthetic sensor data for human activity recognition via texts. I was advised by Prof. Thomas Ploetz and Prof. Hyeokhyen Kwon.
Research
My research lies at the intersection of computer vision and ubiquitous computing. A significant portion of my research focuses on generating synthetic/virtual sensor data from videos and texts to augment existing datasets for human activity recognition. This approach facilitates more robust and generalizable model training. Additionally, I’ve delved into sign language recognition, collaborating with Prof. Thad Starner and technologies for diabetes management in collaboration with Prof. Rosa Arriaga.
Recent News
- 📖 Oct, 2024: Our paper - Emotion Recognition on the Go: Utilizing Wearable IMUs for Personalized Emotion Recognition have been accepted and presented at HASCA within UbiComp/ISWC 2024.
- 📖 Oct, 2024: Our paper - More Data for People with Disabilities! Comparing Data Collection Efforts for Wheelchair Transportation Mode Detection have been published at ISWC and has been presented at UbiComp/ISWC 2024.
- 📖 Sep, 2024: Our paper - IMUGPT 2.0: Language-Based Cross Modality Transfer for Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition have been published at IMWUT.
- 🎉 Aug, 2024: Starting my PhD in Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
- 🏆 Apr, 2024: Awarded the Provost’s Academic Excellence Award, recognizing me as the most outstanding graduating senior from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.
- 🎙️ Apr, 2024: Presented my research on IMUGPT at the ACC Meeting of the Minds conference as one of the five selected undergraduate students representing Georgia Tech.
- 🏆 Apr, 2024: Awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFP), which fully-funds my PhD prgram for three years over a five year period.
- 🏆 Feb, 2024: Awarded the Georgia Tech President’s Fellowship and the Georgia Tech Institute Fellowship to fund my PhD program.
- 📖 Oct, 2023: Our paper - FingerSpeller: Camera-Free Text Entry Using Smart Rings for American Sign Language Fingerspelling Recognition have been accepted and presented at ASSETS 2023.
- 🏆 Oct, 2023: Our paper - Generating Virtual On-body Accelerometer Data from Virtual Textual Descriptions for Human Activity Recognition was awarded the Best Paper Honorable Mention award at UbiComp/ISWC 2023 and received news coverage from Georgia Tech.
- 📖 Oct, 2023: Our paper - On the Benefit of Generative Foundation Models for Human Activity Recognition have been accepted and presented at the Generative AI for Pervasive Computing (GenAI4PC) Symposium within UbiComp/ISWC 2023.
- 📖 Oct, 2023: Our paper - On the Utility of Virtual On-body Acceleration Data for Fine-grained Human Activity Recognition have been published at ISWC and has been presented at UbiComp/ISWC 2023.
- 📖 Oct, 2023: Our paper - Generating Virtual On-body Accelerometer Data from Virtual Textual Descriptions for Human Activity Recognition have been published at ISWC and has been presented at UbiComp/ISWC 2023.
- 🏆 Aug, 2023: Awarded the President’s Undergraduate Research Awards for my research, including both a salary stipend and a travel grant to present my works at UbiComp/ISWC 2023.
- 🎉 May, 2023: Starting my summer internship at Argonne National Lab. I will be working on accelerating graph neural network for ocean simulation.