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

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

Chameleon project image

Sub-symbol beam switching with CSI extraction for ISAC in 5G mmWave networks.

Zhihui Gao, Zhecun Liu, Tingjun Chen.
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2026.

bibtex 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},
}

WISE project image

Disaggregated machine learning via in-physics computing at radio frequency.

Zhihui Gao, Sri Krishna Vadlamani, Kfir Sulimany, Dirk Englund, Tingjun Chen.
Science Advances, 2026.

bibtex 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 project image

Mambas: Maneuvering analog multi-user beamforming using an array of subarrays in mmWave networks.

Zhihui Gao, Zhenzhou Qi, Tingjun Chen.
Proc. ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’24), 2024.

bibtex 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 project image

Swirls: Sniffing Wi-Fi using radios with low sampling rates.

Zhihui Gao, Yiran Chen, Tingjun Chen.
Proc. ACM International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing (MobiHoc’23), 2023.

bibtex 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 project image

Mom: Microphone based 3D orientation measurement.

Zhihui Gao, Ang Li, Dong Li, Jialin Liu, Jie Xiong, Yu Wang, Bing Li, Yiran Chen.
Proc. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN’22), 2022.

bibtex 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 project image

CRISLoc: Reconstructable CSI fingerprinting for indoor smartphone localization.

Zhihui Gao*, Yunfan Gao*, Sulei Wang, Dan Li, Yuedong Xu.
IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT Journal), 2020.

bibtex 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}
}