Moustafa Youssef

Moustafa Youssef is an Egyptian computer scientist who was named an IEEE Fellow in 2019 for contributions to wireless location tracking technologies and an ACM Fellow in 2019 for contributions to location tracking algorithms. He is the first and only ACM Fellow in the Middle East and Africa.

He is the founder and director of the Wireless Research Center, 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 and The American University in Cairo. 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. 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 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.

In 2007, he was the main author of the ACM MobiCom Vision/Challenges paper 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 and sensing 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, and 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. This provided a solution to one of the hurdles of ubiquitous indoor localization, but it also sparked follow-on work by others that build different layers of semantics, e.g. points of interest and place functionalities. This work won the 2013 COMESA Innovation Award. 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 users location. The results in the paper, that won the best paper award at the ACM SGSpatial'13 conference, show that DejaVu can obtain better accuracy than GPS, while having an order of magnitude saving in energy. using the human body as an RF antenna, leverages the concept of 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 their phone, a phenomenon called inverse synthetic-aperture radar. The system can achieve high accuracy without any pre-training.

In 2019, his paper in the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine 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 custom sensors.

Awards and honors In 2019, Youssef became the first computer scientist in the Middle East and Africa In the same year, he also won the COMESA Innovation Award for his DejaVu GPS-replacement technology. On July 2, 2012, his Unloc indoor location determination system was cited in the Scientific American Magazine.

On March 10, 2005, his Horus Wi-Fi-based location determination system was cited in the Washington Times Newspaper.

He is also regularly invited on different Egyptian Talk Shows to talk about his research including Al Qahera Al Youm, Alexandria Satellite Channel, and the Egyptian National Satellite Channel.