About Me

Hi, I am Zhihui Gao, a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, where I work with Prof. Dirk Englund.

I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Duke University in 2026, where I was co-advised by Prof. Tingjun Chen and Prof. Yiran Chen. Before that, I earned my B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering (EE) from Fudan University in 2020, where I worked with Prof. Yuedong Xu.

My research interests include:

Network Systems Machine Learning Systems Cyber-Physical Systems

I am on the job market for tenure-track faculty positions in ECE and CS starting in Fall 2027!

News

Aug, 2026 One first-author paper is accepted in ACM MobiHoc’26!
Aug, 2026 One paper is accepted in IEEE MILCOM’26!
Jun, 2026 One first-author paper is accepted in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing!
Mar, 2026 One paper is accepted in IEEE/ACM ISCA’26!
Mar, 2026 Deliver a talk at the APS Summit 2026!
Feb, 2026 One paper is accepted in IEEE DySPAN’26!
Feb, 2026 Deliver a talk at the MIT OQE Seminars!
Jan, 2026 One first-author paper is accepted in IEEE RFSA’26!
Nov, 2025 One first-author paper is accepted in Science Advances!
Nov, 2025 One paper is accepted in ACM MobiCom’26!
Oct, 2025 Deliver a talk at the Athena Seminar Series!
Sept, 2025 One paper is accepted in MobiCom Workshop WiNTECH’25!
Sept, 2025 One first-author paper is accepted in NeurIPS Workshop AI4NextG’25!
Aug, 2025 Three papers are now available on arXiv.

Research Highlights

Selected Publications

BatStation: Toward In-Situ Radar Sensing on 5G Base Stations with Zero-Shot Template Generation

Zhihui Gao, Zhecun Liu, Tingjun Chen

MobiHoc'26 Proc. ACM International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing, 2026

paper

@inproceedings{gao2026batstation,
  title  = {BatStation: Toward in-situ radar sensing on {5G} base stations with zero-shot template generation},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Liu, Zhecun and Chen, Tingjun},
  booktitle = {Proc. ACM MobiHoc'26},
  year   = {2026},
}

Sub-symbol beam switching project figure

Sub-Symbol Beam Switching with CSI Extraction for ISAC in 5G mmWave Networks

Zhihui Gao, Zhecun Liu, Tingjun Chen

TMC IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2026

paper

@article{gao2026sub,
  title  = {Sub-symbol beam switching with CSI extraction for ISAC in 5G mmWave networks},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Liu, Zhecun and Chen, Tingjun},
  journal = {IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput.},
  year   = {2026},
}

Disaggregated Machine Learning via In-Physics Computing at Radio Frequency

Zhihui Gao, Sri Krishna Vadlamani, Kfir Sulimany, Dirk Englund, Tingjun Chen

Science Advances 2026

code paper talk news

@article{gao2026disaggregated,
  title  = {Disaggregated machine learning via in-physics computing at radio frequency},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Vadlamani, Sri Krishna and Sulimany, Kfir and Englund, Dirk and Chen, Tingjun},
  journal = {Science Advances},
  volume = {12},
  number = {2},
  pages  = {eadz0817},
  year   = {2026},
  publisher = {American Association for the Advancement of Science}
}

Mambas: Maneuvering Analog Multi-User Beamforming Using an Array of Subarrays in mmWave Networks

Zhihui Gao, Zhenzhou Qi, Tingjun Chen

MobiCom'24 Proc. ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2024

code testbed paper

@inproceedings{gao2024mambas,
  title  = {Mambas: Maneuvering analog multi-user beamforming using an array of subarrays in {mmWave} networks},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Qi, Zhenzhou and Chen, Tingjun},
  booktitle = {Proc. ACM MobiCom'24},
  year   = {2024}
}

Swirls: Sniffing Wi-Fi Using Radios with Low Sampling Rates

Zhihui Gao, Yiran Chen, Tingjun Chen

MobiHoc'23 Proc. ACM International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing, 2023

code paper

@inproceedings{gao2023swirls,
  title  = {Swirls: Sniffing {Wi-Fi} using radios with low sampling rates},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Chen, Yiran and Chen, Tingjun},
  booktitle = {Proc. ACM MobiHoc'23},
  year   = {2023}
}

Mom: Microphone Based 3D Orientation Measurement

Zhihui Gao, Ang Li, Dong Li, Jialin Liu, Jie Xiong, Yu Wang, Bing Li, Yiran Chen

IPSN'22 Proc. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2022

code paper

@inproceedings{gao2022mom,
  title  = {Mom: Microphone based {3D} orientation measurement},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Li, Ang and Li, Dong and Liu, Jialin and Xiong, Jie and Wang, Yu and Li, Bing and Chen, Yiran},
  booktitle = {Proc. ACM/IEEE IPSN'22},
  year   = {2022},
}

CRISLoc: Reconstructable CSI Fingerprinting for Indoor Smartphone Localization

Zhihui Gao*, Yunfan Gao*, Sulei Wang, Dan Li, Yuedong Xu

IoT Journal IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2020

dataset paper

@article{gao2020crisloc,
  title  = {CRISLoc: Reconstructable {CSI} fingerprinting for indoor smartphone localization},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Gao, Yunfan and Wang, Sulei and Li, Dan and Xu, Yuedong},
  journal = {IEEE Internet of Things Journal},
  volume = {8},
  number = {5},
  pages  = {3422--3437},
  year   = {2020},
  publisher = {IEEE}
}