New Engineering Professor Builds Better Mobile Apps and Devices

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Tingxin Yan

Looking for a place to park in a crowded parking lot can be frustrating. But in this day and age it has become much easier with smart phone applications, or apps. Tingxin Yan, a new assistant professor in the department of computer science and computer engineering, works to be sure finding a vacant spot is easier. He has designed software for mobile devices including an app that allows users to collect and share information about available parking spaces.

Creating devices that are smarter, faster and use less energy drives his mobile computing research. “I want to help people,” Yan said. “Finding information on devises should happen seamlessly.”

Yan’s research interests are primarily in the areas of mobile and embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, ubiquitous computing, and crowdsourcing.  He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, an M.S. in computer engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Software and a B.S. in computer engineering from Nanjing University. As a graduate student, Yan developed a real-time image search system in which the search results are validated by humans through crowdsourcing.