Haowen Lai

About me

I am currently a Ph.D. student in the CIS department of the University of Pennsylvania for my third year's study, advised by Prof. Mingmin Zhao. Before that, I received my M.S. from Tsinghua University in 2022 and B.Eng. from Tongji University in 2019.

The pronunciation of my name is /'haʊwən 'laɪ/. More information about me can be found in Bio and CV. If you are interested, feel free to contact me via email.

[CV] [Google Scholar] [LinkedIn] [GitHub]

Research Interests

My research lies at the intersection of wireless sensing, autonomous systems, and robotics, with a focus on building trustworthy and robust perception systems for mobile robots. I am particularly interested in leveraging wireless signals to enable resilient environmental understanding and situational awareness, especially in challenging or GPS-/vision-denied environments. My goal is to develop perception methods that are not only accurate but also reliable and safe, supporting critical applications such as autonomous navigation, search and rescue missions, and long-term deployment of robotic systems in dynamic, real-world settings.

News

• Feb. 2025, our paper Enabling Visual Recognition at Radio Frequency is covered by BBC!
• Nov. 2024, won the 1st place in ACM MobiCom 2024 Student Research Competition.
• Nov. 2024, our paper Enabling Visual Recognition at Radio Frequency won the Best Demo Award in MobiCom 2024.
• Jun. 2022, earned my M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, supervised by Prof. Yisheng Zhong.
• Feb. 2022, I am one of the organizers of the ICRA 2022 General Place Recognition Competition.
• May. 2021, I joined the Air Lab of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a summer intern, supervised by Prof. Sebastian Scherer.
• Jul. 2020, I had my internship in Beijing Novauto Technology Co., Ltd.
• Jun. 2019, earned my B.E. degree as outstanding undergraduate.
• Jul. 2018, won the first prize in Intel Cup ESDC.