ECE faculty Yingying Chen's work received the IEEE ICDCS 2026 Distinguished Paper Award
The paper by Prof. Yingying Chen and her students titled “BeamGes: Motion Resilient Hand Gesture Recognition on Smartphones Using Beamforming Feedback Information” has won the Distinguished Paper Award in IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2026. IEEE ICDCS is a highly selective conference with the acceptance rate at only 18.6% in 2026. The conference was held in Seoul, Korea last week. This recognition marked the 9th Best Paper Award received in Yingying Chen's research group (12th total best paper awards considering both best paper awards and best paper runner up awards).
BeamGes is a collaborative project with Temple University. The authors are Zijie Tang, Zejun Xu, Yan Wang and Yingying Chen. BeamGes is the first motion-resilient hand gesture recognition system that is designed for commodity smartphones without any modifications. Existing WiFi-based hand gesture recognition technologies assume the phone and the user remain still, as WiFi signals are prone to body-motion artifacts, making it hard to deploy in realistic scenarios. BeamGes addresses this challenge by leveraging beamforming feedback information (BFI), a publicly available signal in WiFi communications. The system separates the hand gesture signal from noise caused by body motion using a dual neural encoder design paired with a cross-fusion mechanism. Additionally, it devises a lightweight transfer-learning method that adapts to new environments with only a small amount of labeled data. Extensive experiments over six months across various environments, devices, and motion conditions demonstrated that BeamGes can achieve 89.2% accuracy, indicating that reliable, touchless gesture sensing is possible on commodity smartphones under practical conditions.
Congratulations to Prof. Yingying Chen and her team !
