Moustafa Youssef

Moustafa Youssef (Arabic: مصطفى يوسف‎) is an Egyptian computer scientist who was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2019[5] for contributions to wireless location tracking technologies and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2019[6] for contributions to location tracking algorithms. He is the first and only ACM Fellow in the Middle East and Africa.[7]

Moustafa Youssef
Moustafa Youssef in 2018
Born1975
Alexandria, Egypt
NationalityEgyptian
CitizenshipEgyptian
Alma materAlexandria University (B.Sc., M.Sc.)
University of Maryland, College Park (M.Sc., Ph.D.)
Known forLocation tracking algorithms and systems
Ubiquitous indoor localization
Sensor-less sensing
Horus System
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsAlexandria University
Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology
Nile University
University of Maryland, College Park
ThesisHorus: A WLAN-based Indoor Location Determination System (2004)
Doctoral advisorAshok Agrawala

He is the founder and director of the Wireless Research Center,[8] Alexandria University, Egypt.


Early life and education

Moustafa Youssef was born in 1975, in Alexandria, Egypt. He received a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Computer and Systems Engineering from Alexandria University before moving to the United States to complete his PhD at the University of Maryland at College Park, supervised by Ashok Agrawala.

Career

After completing his PhD in the United States, Youssef decided to return to Egypt, where he currently holds an appointment as professor at Alexandria University.[9] Since his return to Egypt, he went on sabbatical to different Egyptian universities including Nile University and Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology. He established the Wireless Research Center in 2010, which he is currently directing.[8]

Since 2015, he has been appointed as a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan.[10] He has been also a regular Visiting Researcher at Google since 2016.

Research

Youssef's key work focuses on pervasive and mobile computing with a focus on location determination systems and algorithms. His Ph.D. thesis[11] gave the design and implementation of the Horus WLAN location determination system. The Horus system is considered to be one of the earliest WiFi-based tracking systems and the first probabilistic scheme.[12]

In 2007, he was the main author of the ACM MobiCom Vision/Challenges paper[13] that introduced the concept of device-free localization (also known as sensor-less sensing and through-the-wall sensing), one of the still current hot topics in location tracking research. Traditional tracking techniques require attaching a device to the tracked entity. Device-free localization allows detecting, tracking, and identifying objects without any attachment, by analyzing their effect on the ambient wireless signals. This paradigm-shifting approach for localization opens the door for many novel applications such as intrusion detection, smart homes, ubiquitous gesture-controlled IoT devices, among many others.

In 2012, he introduced a vision and system for leveraging crowdsourced phone sensor data to automatically construct indoor floorplans by a building’s everyday users.[14] This provided a solution to one of the hurdles of ubiquitous indoor localization, but it also sparked follow-on work by others that builds different layers of semantics, e.g. points of interest and place functionalities. This work won the 2013 COMESA Innovation Award.[9]

In 2013, he introduced the DejaVu system for providing energy-efficient highly-accurate GPS replacement.[15] GPS-replacement systems usually traded accuracy for energy-efficiency. DejaVu uses the energy-efficient phone sensors to detect virtual landmarks in the physical space that can be used to accurately pinpoint the user location. The results in the paper, that won the best paper award[16] at the ACM SGSpatial'13 conference, show that DejaVu can obtain better accuracy than GPS, while having an order of magnitude saving in energy.[15] DejaVu also won the 2015 COMESA Innovation Award.[2]

In 2015, his WiGest gesture recognition system[17] leverages the concept sensor-less sensing to provide a calibration-free high-accuracy gesture recognition system for any Wi-Fi-enabled device. The idea is to leverage the changes in the ambient WiFi signals to detect the gesture the user is performing with her phone. The system can achieve high accuracy without any pre-training.

In 2019, his paper in the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine[18] extends the concept of sensor-less sensing to include sensing indirectly through the energy harvested from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The key concept is that the motion of persons and their hands will affect the energy harvested from the IoT devices (e.g. those using solar panels) and hence, by analyzing the changes in the harvested energy, one can sense the environment without using and custom sensors.

Awards and honors

In 2019, Youssef became the first computer scientist in the Middle East and Africa[7] to be named a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) for his contributions to location tracking algorithms.[6]

He was also named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the same year.[5]

In 2017, he received the Egyptian State Excellence Award.[9]

In 2015, he was named an Distinguished Scientist of the Association of Computing Machinery.[1] In the same year, he also won the COMESA Innovation Award for his DejaVu GPS-replacement technology.[2] Moreover, he received the Alexandria University Commemorative Medal.[9]

In 2013, he won the COMESA Innovation Award for his CrowdInside system for the automatic construction of indoor floorplans.[9] He also received the Egyptian Dr. Venice Kamel Gouda's Award for Innovative Technologies.[9]

In 2012, he received the Egyptian State Encouragement Award for Engineering Sciences.[9]

In 2010, he received the joint TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award for Young Scientists.[3]

In 2004, his thesis work received the Invention of the Year Award[4] from the University of Maryland, College Park.

In 1997, he was awarded Prof. Abdelsamie Moustafa award, and Prof. Naim Aboutaleb award from the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University for being ranked first on the Faculty of Engineering and the Computer and Systems Engineering Department, respectively.[9]

In 1992, he received the Egyptian Ministry of Education Certificate of Honor for being ranked Third Nationwide in the General Secondary School Certificate exam.[9]

Media Coverage

Youssef's research has attracted the general and technical media. On September 21, 2012, his CrowdInside system for the automatic construction of indoor floorplans was featured in the MIT Technology Review Magazine.[19] On July 2, 2012, his Unloc indoor location determination system was cited in the Scientific American Magazine.[20]

On March 10, 2005, his Horus Wi-Fi-based location determination system was cited in the Washington Times Newspaper.[9] Similarly, the Horus system was also cited on June 19 2003 in the New York Times Newspaper.[21]

He is also regularly invited on different Egyptian Talk Shows to talk about his research including Al Qahera Al Youm,[9] Nile TV International,[22] Alexandria Satellite Channel,[23] Egyptian National Satellite Channel.[24]


References
  1. "Prof. Moustafa Youssef's ACM Awards". ACM. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
  2. "2015 COMESA Innovation Award". COMESA Secretary.
  3. "2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award". Microsoft Research.
  4. "Invention of the Year Award". University of Maryland.
  5. "2019 Newly Elevated Fellows" (PDF). IEEE Fellows Directory.
  6. "2019 ACM Fellows". ACM Fellows Directory.
  7. "ACM Fellows in the Middle East". ACM Fellows Directory.
  8. "The Wireless Research Center". Alexandria University. Retrieved June 16, 2020.
  9. "Moustafa Youssef's Resume" (PDF). University of Maryland. Retrieved May 11, 2019.
  10. "Talk by Prof. Moustafa Youssef". NII, Japan. Retrieved June 16, 2020.
  11. "Moustafa Youssef's Ph.D. thesis". University of Maryland. Retrieved June 16, 2020.
  12. Youssef, Moustafa; Agrawala, Ashok; Shankar, A Udaya (2003). "WLAN location determination via clustering and probability distributions". Proceedings of the First IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2003.(PerCom 2003).: 143–150. doi:10.1109/PERCOM.2003.1192736. ISBN 0-7695-1893-1. S2CID 2096671.
  13. Youssef, Moustafa; Mah, Matthew; Agrawala, Ashok (2007). "Challenges: device-free passive localization for wireless environments". Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking: 222–229. doi:10.1145/1287853.1287880. S2CID 207165124.
  14. Alzantot, Moustafa; Youssef, Moustafa (2012). "Crowdinside: automatic construction of indoor floorplans". Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems: 99–108. arXiv:1209.3794. doi:10.1145/2424321.2424335. S2CID 13975299.
  15. Aly, Heb; Youssef, Moustafa (2013). "Dejavu: an accurate energy-efficient outdoor localization system". Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems: 154–163. doi:10.1145/2525314.2525338. S2CID 17738635.
  16. "Award Recipients". ACM SIGSpatial. Retrieved June 16, 2020.
  17. Abdelnasser, Heba; Youssef, Moustafa; Harras, Khaled (2015). "WiGest: A ubiquitous wifi-based gesture recognition system". 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM): 1472–1480. arXiv:1501.04301. doi:10.1109/INFOCOM.2015.7218525. ISBN 978-1-4799-8381-0. S2CID 12194211.
  18. Youssef, Moustafa; Hassan, Mahbub (2019). "Next Generation IoT: Toward Ubiquitous Autonomous Cost-Efficient IoT Devices". IEEE Pervasive Computing. 18 (4): 8–11. doi:10.1109/MPRV.2019.2947974. S2CID 210972412.
  19. "Smartphone App Crowdsources Indoor Floor Plans". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
  20. "Mixed Signals: Smart Phone Sensors Recruited to Deliver Indoor GPS". Scientific American Magazine. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
  21. "WHAT'S NEXT?; Where Is Everybody? The Wireless Network Might Know". New York Times. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
  22. "Prof. Youssef's Interview on Nile TV International Satellite Channel". Nile TV International. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
  23. "Prof. Youssef's Interview on Alexandria Satellite Channel". Alexandria Satellite Channel. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
  24. "Prof. Youssef's Interview on the Egyptian National Satellite Channel". Egyptian National Satellite Channel. Retrieved 17 June 2020.


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