Abstract
We live in a world where both our bodies and environments are sensed at unprecedented scale and granularity. However, the trustworthiness of sensed data is increasingly in question. Physiological sensing is affected by motion, user variability, and how sensors are used, while audiovisual media is challenged by the rise of deepfakes and AI-generated content that blur the boundary between real and fake. As such, sensing is no longer just about acquiring signals — it is about establishing trust.
In this talk I present our efforts to make sensing systems trustworthy by design and share the journey that led me to these problems. For human sensing, we explore everyday fabrics as a ubiquitous, continuous sensing medium. Through hardware-software co-design, we address real-world challenges such as motion noise and user diversity, enabling applications ranging from physical motion sensing to physiological monitoring for a kangaroo mother’s care and sleep.
On sensing the physical world, we investigate embedding verifiable physical signatures directly into the environment. I will present our design of imperceptible light signatures that can be projected into a scene and embedded into any video recordings, enabling verification of live speech videos without requiring compliance from recording parties. I will also discuss our ongoing effort of embedding real-time, unforgeable, and robust audio watermarks into live speech audios, enabling verification of audio integrity.
Together, these efforts point toward a sensing paradigm where trust is not inferred after the fact, but physically embedded into signals and environments from which data is captured.
Biography
Xia Zhou is an associate professor in the department of computer science at Columbia University, where she directs the Mobile X laboratory. Before joining Columbia in 2022, she was a faculty member in the department of computer science at Dartmouth College. Her research lies broadly in mobile computing, with recent work exploring light and textile sensing for applications in health, security, robotics, and human-computer interaction. Her work has been widely recognized, including the Distinguished Paper Award at UbiComp (2026), 10-Year UbiComp Impact Award (2024), Best Paper Awards at MobiSys (2024) and NSDI (2020), SIGMOBILE Research Highlights (2026, 2017, 2016), along with other best paper, demo and video awards. She is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) in 2019, SIGMOBILE RockStar Award in 2019, the Karen E. Wetterhahn Memorial Award in 2018, and was named an N2Women Rising Star in 2017. She also received the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2017, NSF CAREER Award in 2016, and Google Faculty Research Award in 2014. She received her doctoral degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2013 and her master’s degree from Peking University in 2007.
