Faculty DirectoryStephen Xia
Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science
Contact
2145 Sheridan RoadTech L457
Evanston, IL 60208-3109
Email Stephen Xia
Website
Departments
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Education
Ph.D. Electrical Engineering, Columbia University
B.S. Electrical Engineering, Rice University
Research Interests
My research focuses on bringing artificial intelligence to the physical world to create smarter, healthier, and safer environments. I develop resource-efficient systems and methods that allow us to embed intelligent perception and reasoning into common infrastructure and everyday objects found all around us and realize useful applications that improve our overall quality of life.
My work is at the intersection between systems, embedded AI, and data, spanning several domains including mobile and embedded systems, cyber-physical systems, IoT, wearables, edge computing, smart cities, machine learning, robotics, and digital health.
Selected Publications
Yuxuan Li, Yicheng Gao, Ning Yang, Stephen Xia. "TW-CRL: Time-Weighted Contrastive Reward Learning for Efficient Inverse Reinforcement Learning." 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 2026.
Payal Mohapatra, Yueyuan Sui, Akash Pandey, Stephen Xia, Qi Zhu. "MAESTRO: Adaptive Sparse Attention and Robust Learning for Multimodal Dynamic Time Series." 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). 2025.
Minghui Zhao, Junxi Xia, Kaiyuan Hou, Yanchen Liu, Stephen Xia, Xiaofan Jiang. "FlexiFly: Interfacing the Physical World with Foundation Models Empowered by Reconfigurable Drone Systems." Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys). 2025.
Yueyuan Sui, Minghui Zhao, Junxi Xia, Xiaofan Jiang and Stephen Xia. "TRAMBA: A Hybrid Transformer and Mamba Architecture for Practical Audio and Bone Conduction Speech Super Resolution and Enhancement on Mobile and Wearable Platforms." Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 2024.
Stephen Xia, Minghui Zhao, Charuvahan Adhivarahan, Kaiyuan Hou, Yuyang Chen, Jingping Nie, Eugene Wu, Karthik Dantu and Xiaofan Jiang. "Anemoi: A Low-cost Sensorless Indoor Drone System for Automatic Mapping of 3D Airflow Fields." 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’23), 2023.
Stephen Xia, Peter Wei, Yanchen Liu, Andrew Sonta and Xiaofan Jiang. "RECA: A Multi-Task Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Recommender System for Co-Optimizing Energy, Comfort and Air Quality in Commercial Buildings." 10th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys’23), 2023.
Jingping Nie, Stephen Xia, Yanchen Liu, Shengxuan Ding, Lanxiang Hu, Minghui Zhao, Yuang Fan, Mohamed Abdel-Aty, Matthias Preindl and Xiaofan Jiang. "A Data-Driven and Human-Centric EV Charging Recommendation System at City-Scale." 14th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy’23), 2023.
Kaiyuan Hou, Stephen Xia, Emily Bejerano and Xiaofan Jiang. "ARSteth: Enabling Home Self-Screening with AR-Assisted Intelligent Stethoscopes." 22nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN’23), 2023.
Minghui Zhao, Stephen Xia, Jingping Nie, Kaiyuan Hou, Avik Dhupar and Xiaofan Jiang. "LegoSENSE: An Open and Modular Sensing Platform for Rapidly-Deployable IoT Applications." 8th ACM/IEEE Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI’23), 2023.
Yanchen Liu, Jingping Nie, Stephen Xia, Jiajing Sun, Peter Wei and Xiaofan Jiang. "SoFIT: Self-Orienting Camera Network for Floor Mapping and Indoor Tracking." 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS’22), 2022.
Stephen Xia and Xiaofan Jiang. "AvA: An Adaptive Audio Filtering Architecture for Enhancing Mobile, Embedded, and Cyber-physical Systems." 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN’22), 2022.
Kaiyuan Hou, Yanchen Liu, Peter Wei, Chenye Yang, Hengjiu Kang, Stephen Xia, Teresa Spada, Andrew Rundle and Xiaofan Jiang. "A Low-Cost In-situ System for Continuous Multi-Person Fever Screening." 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN’22), 2022.
Stephen Xia, Jingping Nie and Xiaofan Jiang. "CSafe: An Intelligent Audio Wearable Platform for Improving Construction Worker Safety in Urban Environments." 20th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN '21), 2021.
Jingping Nie, Yigong Hu, Yuanyuting Wang, Stephen Xia and Xiaofan Jiang. " SPIDERS: Low-Cost Wireless Glasses for Continuous In-Situ Bio-Signal Acquisition and Emotion Recognition." 5th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI’20), 2020.
Stephen Xia, Daniel de Godoy Peixoto, Bashima Islam, Md Tamzeed Islam, Shahriar Nirjon, Peter R. Kinget and Xiaofan Jiang. "Improving Pedestrian Safety in Cities using Intelligent Wearable Systems." IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2019.
Stephen Xia, Peter Wei, Jordan M. Vega and Xiaofan Jiang. "Spindles+: An Adaptive and Personalized System for Leg Shake Detection." Smart Health, 2018.