Yi Ding

Assistant Professor at UT Dallas

I am currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas. My research interests lie at the intersection of cyber-physical systems (CPS), mobile computing, and machine learning. I am interested in combining wireless sensing and machine learning on mobile devices in CPS and cyber-human systems (CHS) like location-based services, urban delivery, and smart cities. Some of the future projects will study how to integrate AI models like LLM into the systems.

Previously, I was a Postdoc at MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and Media Lab. I received my Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. I have my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Zhejiang University in China.

I am looking for self-motivated students, in terms of PhD (TA/RA), Research Intern, and Visiting Students. Experience in mobile computing and machine learning is preferred. If you are interested, please send your CV and transcripts to yi.ding at utdallas dot edu.

Please find my CV here.

Recent News

  • May 2025: Paper on human activity recognition with LLMs accepted by ACM SIGKDD.
  • May 2025: Serve as a panelist at NSF.
  • May 2025: Give a talk at CPS-IoT Week 2025 Sensor S&P workshop on the topic of Mobile AI.
  • Apr. 2025: PhD student Xiao Yan received NSF Student Travel Grants for CPS-IoT 2025. Congratulations!
  • Apr. 2025: Attend the CCC Computational and Citizen Science Research Workshop in DC.
  • Mar. 2025: Workshop paper on measurement study of LLM on mobile devices accepted by FMSys’25.
  • Feb. 2025: Invited to join ACM IMWUT Editorial Board as Associate Editor (AE).
  • Jan. 2025: Paper accepted by ACM WWW (the Web Conference).
  • Dec. 2024: Paper on satellite-based sensing accepted by IEEE PerCom.
  • Nov. 2024: Serve as Track Chair for Cloud/Edge Applications Track at IEEE Cloud Summit 2025.
  • Nov. 2024: Serve as program committee for ACM MobiSys 2025.
  • Oct. 2024: Serve as a panelist at NSF.
  • Sep. 2024: Serve as program committee for AAAI-AISI 2025.
  • Aug. 2024: Invited talk at the University of North Dakota
  • July 2024: Paper on parking violation prediction accepted by ACM CIKM.
  • May 2024: Paper accepted by IEEE TKDE.
  • May 2024: Serve as a panelist at NSF.
  • May 2024: Attend CPS/IoT Week 2024 in Hong Kong.
More ...


  • Apr. 2024: Serve as program committee on the SIGCOMM’24 Posters and Demos.
  • Apr. 2024: Serve as a panelist at NSF.
  • Apr. 2024: Two papers accepted by UbiComp/IMWUT.
  • Mar. 2024: Attend NSF CPS PI Meeting as Aspiring PI.
  • Feb. 2024: Attend NSF S&CC PI Meeting as a program participant.
  • Dec. 2023: Paper accepted by IEEE TMC.
  • Nov. 2023: Presentation on NSF IoT/S&CC workshop at UW
  • Sep. 2023: Paper accepted by VLDB 2024.
  • Aug. 2023: Start Assistant Professor appointment at UT Dallas.
  • Jul. 2023: Serve as program committee on the SIGCOMM’23 Posters and Demos.
  • Apr. 2023: Co-authored paper accepted by ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN).
  • Mar. 2023: Serve as a reviewer for ACM SIGKDD 2023.
  • Oct. 2022: Start postdoctoral associate appointment at MIT.
  • Aug. 2022: Co-authored paper accepted by ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022.
  • Aug. 2022: Present Para-Pred at KDD. Glad to see some new friends and old friends.
  • Jul. 2022: Gave a talk at Kargo.
  • Jul. 2022: 1st-authored paper accepted by IEEE/ACM ToN.
  • Jun. 2022: I gave a talk to the Location-based Service (LBS) team in ByteDance.
  • May. 2022: Co-authored paper accepted by ACM SIGKDD’22.
  • Apr. 2022: Selected to participate in the CPS Rising Stars Workshop 2022.
  • Apr. 2022: Co-authored paper accepted by ACM IMWUT (UbiComp’22).
  • Feb. 2022: 2nd-authored paper accepted by ACM MobiCom’22.
  • Jan. 2022: 1st-authored paper P2-Loc accepted by ACM IMWUT (UbiComp’22).
  • Nov. 2021: Co-authored paper won the outstanding paper award at IEEE RTSS’21.
  • Oct. 2021: VALID mentioned in MIT Technology Review.
  • Oct. 2021: 1st-author paper SmartLoc accepted by ACM IMWUT (UbiComp’22).
  • Aug. 2021: Co-authored paper accepted by IEEE RTSS’21.
  • Jul. 2021: 2nd-author paper ALWAES accepted by ACM IMWUT (UbiComp’21).
  • Jul. 2021: 1st-author paper accepted by IEEE/ACM ToN.
  • Jul. 2021: Data-set released of on-demand delivery order distribution in Shenzhen.
  • Jul. 2021: 1st-author paper RL-Dispatch accepted by ACM IMWUT (UbiComp’21).
  • Apr. 2021: 1st-author paper VALID accepted by SIGCOMM’ 21.
  • Apr. 2021: aBeacon paper presented at NSDI’ 21.
  • Sep. 2020: Data-set released of Bluetooth beacons, couriers’ reports, and trajectories.
  • Aug. 2020: aBeacon system introduced in Alibaba Tech. officials accounts.
  • Aug. 2020: 2nd-author paper Trans-Loc accepted by MobiCom’ 20.
  • Jun. 2020: 1st-author paper aBeacon accepted by NSDI’ 21.