Sara Khalifa

News

October 2017. Our paper “HARKE: Human Activity Recognition from Kinetic Energy Harvesting Data in Wearable Devices” is accepted in Transaction on Mobile Computing Journal.

August 2017. Our KEH-Sense project is selected as a MERIT Recipient of the 2017 National iAwards Research and Development Innovation of the year.

June 2017. Our KEH-Sense project is selected as a WINNER for TWO Awards at 2017 NSW iAwards Mobility Innovation of the year and  Research & Development Innovation of the year.

June 22, 2017. Giving an invited talk at Transport and Logistics Living Lab Workshop.

May 25, 2017. Our work on the use of kinetic energy harvesting as a power source and authentication method is presented in The Conversation.

May 2017. Our work on kinetic energy harvesting (KEH) based user authentication has attracted a lot of media coverage including CSIRO News, Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), ABC News, Lifehacher,… etc.

April 27, 2017. I am invited as a TPC member for the IEEE LCN 2017 conference.

January 6, 2017. Our work on the use of kinetic energy harvesting for transportation mode detection is featured on IEEE Xplore Innovation Spotlight under the title ” Kinetic Energy Harvesting Lightening the Way for Urban Planning“. IEEE Xplore Innovation Spotlight features articles on cutting-edge topics handpicked from the IEEE Xplore digital library of over 4 million technical documents.

December 13, 2016, Accepted conference paper: Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Sara Khalifa, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu, “VEH-COM: Demodulating Vibration Energy Harvesting for Short Range Communication”, accepted for publication in IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom2017).

10 November 2016. Accepted conference paper: Weitao Xu, Guohao Lan, Qi Lin, Sara Khalifa, Neil Bergmann, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu, “KEH-Gait: Towards a Mobile Healthcare User Authentication System by Kinetic Energy Harvesting”, accepted for publication in the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium 2017 (NDSS’17) to be held in San Diego, USA, February 26 – March 1, 2017..

21 October 2016: Winner of the 2017 John Makepeace Bennett award for the Australasian Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation. This Award is presented by CORE (Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia) for the best PhD thesis of the year within Australia and New Zealand in the field of Computer Science.

Our paper entitled “Energy Harvesting Wearables Can Tell Which Train Route You Have Taken”, has been accepted in the 10th LCN IEEE Workshop On User MObility and VEhicular Networks.

Short Bio

Dr Khalifa is currently a researcher at Data61|CSIRO (formerly known as NICTA), Australia and a casual academic staff at School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Her current research interests include smart wearables, Internet of Things, energy harvesting, pattern recognition, human activity recognition and indoor positioning. She is a Technical Program Committee Member in the Work in Progress Session (IEEE PerCom, 2016) and IEEE Workshop on Internet of Things 2016 (WIoT 2016).

She received a postdoctoral writing fellowship from NICTA (Dec 2015-Mar 2016) and worked as a research assistant (Sep 2015-Nov 2015) at CSE, UNSW. She received many awards including”2016 NASSCOM Highly Commended Award” and “2015 Canon Information Systems Research Australia (CISRA) Best Research Paper Award at UNSW”. She has authored more than 10 papers in the area of pervasive computing and pattern recognition. She has been a reviewer of a number of conference papers and journals.

She completed a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from UNSW in February 2016. She obtained MSc and BSc in Computer Science from Zagazig University, Egypt in 2011 and 2007, respectively. She has secured First Class with Distinction throughout her studies. She was a Lecturer Assistant in the Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Zagazig University, Egypt from September 2007- January 2012. During this period, Sara taught various Computer Science subjects and worked as a co-Supervisor for several undergraduate student projects.

Projects

HARKE: Human Activity Recognition using Kinetic Energy Harveting

KEH-Sense: Technology for self-powering wearables

Awards and Achievements

Winner of 2016 NASSCOM “Highly Commended” IT Technical Innovation Award, for the research project “Efficient use of kinetic energy harvesting for self-powered wearables”, April 2016.

Our poster “Transportation Mode Detection Using Kinetic Energy Harvesting Wearables”,won the best poster award in the Work In Progress session in IEEE International Conference of Pervasive Computing and Communication (Percom2016), March 2016.

Received Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship from National ICT Australia (NICTA), Dec 2015-Mar 2016.

Winner of the 2015 Canon Information Systems Research Australia (CISRA) Best Research Paper Award at UNSW, for the paper titled “Pervasive Self-powered Human Activity Recognition without the Accelerometer”, November 2015. (Value: $2000 and a certificate from the dean), November 2015.

Winner of the Best Presentation Prize over school of Computer Science and Engineering in the UNSW Engineering Postgraduate Research Symposium (EPRS2015), for the presentation entitled “Energy Efficient Human Activity Recognition for Wearable Devices”,  (Value: $500 and a certificate from the dean), November 2015.

Winner of the Best Poster Award under the category of “Signal processing, imaging, and embedded systems” in The 7th IEEE technology of the Future (ITOF 2015) competition, for the poster titled “Enabling Battery-less Wearables: Tracking Activities from Bodys Kinetic Energy” (Value: $500 and a certificate from the main chair), October 2015.

Current Activities

  • Technical Program Committee Member, ACM SIGSPATIAL’16-SRC (ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems – Student Research Competition).
  • Technical Program Committee Member, IEEE 85th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2017-Spring: Sydney), Track: 1. Ad-Hoc, Mesh, M2M, and Sensor Networks, 2017.
  • Technical Program Committee Member, IEEE LCN Workshop on Internet of Things (WIoT), 2016.

Some previous activities

  •  Invited Speaker at the North Sydney Girls’ High Careers Day, May 2016.
  • Invited Speaker at S1 2016 NICTA Welcome Session for new PhD, April 2016.
  • Technical Program Committee Member, Work in Progress Session. IEEE PerCom, 2016.
  • Reviewer for 2016 GeoInformatica Special issue on Mobile Computing for Geospatial Systems.
  • Reviewer for Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 2015.
  • Reviewer for Journal of Computer Communications, 2015.
  • Session Chair, The 2015 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings2015), Sydney, Australia, 11-13 December 2015.
  • Reviewer for the International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 2012.

Publications

Book Chapter

  1. S. Khalifa, G. Lan, M. Hassan, W. Hu, and A. Seneviratne, “Human Activity and Context Detection from Kinetic Energy Harvesting Wearables,” accepted in “Handbook of Research on Wearable Computing Innovations and Applications”, 2017.

Journal Articles 

  1. Sara Khalifa, Guohao Lan, Mahbub Hassan, Aruna Seneviratne, and Sajal K. Das, “HARKE: Human Activity Recognition from Kinetic Energy Harvesting Data in Wearable Devices”. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Volume PP, Issue 99, October 2017.
  2. S. Seneviratne, Y. Hu, T. Nguyen, G. Lan, S. Khalifa, K. Thilakarathna, M. Hassan, A. Seneviratne, “A Survey of Wearable Devices and Challenges,” in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials , vol. PP, no. 99, 2017.
  3. G. Lan, S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and W. Hu, “Estimating Calorie Expenditure from Output Voltage of Piezoelectric Energy Harvester – an Experimental Feasibility Study”, EAI Endorsed Transactions on Pervasive Health and Technology, volume 16, issue 7, 2016. (Invited Paper).
  4. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, A. Seneviratne, and S. K. Das, “Energy harvesting wearables for activity-aware services,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 8–16, 2015. (Nine Pages, ERA rank: B, IF:2.00)
  5. S. Khalifa, N. Lashin and, I. ElHenamwy, “Support Vector Machine and K-Nearest Neighbor Based Microcalcification Classification in a Mammographic CAD System,” IJETSE International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Sciences and Engineering, Vol 5, no 1, Sep 2011. (Eight Pages)
  6. El Henawy, N. Lashin, S. Khalifa, “A Novel CAD System for Reliable Classification of Microcalcification in Digital Mammograms,” in Journal Of Computer Science And Engineering, Vol 3, no 1, 2010. (Eight Pages)

 Refereed Conference Papers 

  1. G. Lan, W. Xu, S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and W. Hu, “VEH-COM: Demodulating Vibration Energy Harvesting for Short Range Communication”, in proceedings of IEEE Percom 2017. (ERA Rank A, Acceptance rate=14%).
  2. Weitao Xu, Guohao Lan, Qi Lin, Sara Khalifa, Neil Bergmann, Mahbub Hassan, and Wen Hu , “KEH-Gait: Towards a Mobile Healthcare User Authentication System by Kinetic Energy Harvesting” , In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’17), San Diego, USA, February 26 – March 1, 2017. (ERA Rank A, Acceptance rate: 16%)
  3. Marzieh Jalal Abadi, Sara Khalifa, Salil S Kanhere, and Mahbub Hassan, ” Energy Harvesting Wearables Can Tell Which Train Route You Have Taken”, in the 10th IEEE LCN Workshop On User MObility and VEhicular Networks, Dubai UAE, November 7-10, 2016.
  4. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Feasibility and Accuracy of Hotword Detection using Vibration Energy Harvester”, accepted in WoWMoM 2016, Coimbra, Portugal, June 21-24, 2016. (ERA Rank: A, acceptance rate: 21.5%)
  5. S. Khalifa, G. Lan,  M. Hassan and W. Hu, “A Bayesian Framework for Energy-Neutral Activity Monitoring with Self-Powered Wearable Sensors”, the 12th IEEE PerCom Workshop on Context and Activity Modeling and Recognition, Sydney, Australia, 14-18 March 2016. (ERA Rank: A)
  6. G. Lan, W. Xu, S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and W. Hu, “Transportation Mode Detection Using Kinetic Energy Harvesting  Wearables”, in proceedings of  IEEE Percom WiP2016, Sydney, Australia, 14-18 March, 2016. (Best Poster Award, ERA Rank: A)
  7. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Step detection from power generation pattern in energy-harvesting wearable devices”, in proceedings of  IEEE iThings 2015, Sydney, Australia, 11-13 December, 2015.
  8. G. Lan, S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and W. Hu, “Estimating calorie expenditure from output voltage of piezoelectric energy harvester – an experimental feasibility study,” in Proceedings of the 10th EAI International Conference on Body Area Networks (BodyNets), Sydney, Australia, 28-30 September, 2015.
  9. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Pervasive Self-powered Human Activity Recognition without the Accelerometer”, in proceedings of the (Percom 2015), St Louis, Missouri, USA, March  23-27, 2015 (ERA rank: A, acceptance rate: 14.7%)
  10. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Feature Selection for Floor-changing Activity Recognition in Multi-Floor Pedestrian Navigation”, in proceedings of the ICMU2014, Singapore, 6-8 January 2014.
  11. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Adaptive Pedestrian Activity Classification for Indoor Dead Reckoning Systems”, in proceedings of the IPIN2013, Montbeliard-Belfort, France, 28-31 October 2013.
  12. S. Khalifa, “Converting context to indoor position using built-in smartphone sensors”, in the PhD forum of PerCom Conference 2013, San Diego, California, 18-22 March 2013. (ERA rank: A)
  13. S. Khalifa and M. Hassan, “Evaluating Mismatch Probability of Activity-based Map Matching in Indoor Positioning”, in proceedings of  IPIN2012, Sydney, Australia, 15-17 November 2012.

Other Publications

  1. S. Khalifa, “Energy-efficient Human Activity Recognition for Self-powered Wearable Devices”, PhD Dissertation, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, February 2016.            http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/datastream/unsworks:39535/SOURCE02?view=true

  2.  S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne ,“Human Activity Recognition for Indoor Positioning using Smartphone Accelerometer”, a technical report in the school of computer science and engineering, UNSW, Australia, 2013.           ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/doc/papers/UNSW/201303.pdf

  3.  S. Khalifa, “Breast Cancer Detection through Image Processing Techniques” MSc Dissertation, Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Zagazig University, March 2011   http://main.eulc.edu.eg/eulc_v5/Libraries/Thesis/BrowseThesisPages.aspx?fn=PublicDrawTh      esis&BibID=11608059

Pending patents

  1. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Energy Harvesting for Sensor Systems”. (Provisional Patent Application No. 2016900941), filed on 14 March 2016.

  2. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, A. Seneviratne, and Wen Hu, “Energy Harvesting for Sensor Systems PART 2” (Provisional Patent Application No. 2016900940), filed on 14 March 2016.

  3. S. Khalifa, M. Hassan, and A. Seneviratne, “Energy Harvesting for Sensor Systems PART 3, Activity Pulse” (Provisional Patent Application No. 2016900938), filed on 14 March 2016.