Moustafa Youssef


Moustafa Youssef is an Egyptian computer scientist who was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2019 for contributions to wireless location tracking technologies and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery in 2019 for contributions to location tracking algorithms. He is the first and only ACM Fellow in the Middle East and Africa.
He is the founder and director of the Wireless Research Center, Alexandria University, Egypt.

Early life and education

Moustafa Youssef was born in 1975, in Alexandria, Egypt. He received a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Computer and Systems Engineering from Alexandria University before moving to the United States to complete his PhD at the University of Maryland at College Park, supervised by Ashok Agrawala.

Career

After completing his PhD in the United States, Youssef decided to return to Egypt, where he currently holds an appointment as professor at Alexandria University. Since his return to Egypt, he went on sabbatical to different Egyptian universities including Nile University and Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology. He established the Wireless Research Center in 2010, which he is currently directing.
Since 2015, he has been appointed as a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Informatics, Japan. He has been also a regular Visiting Researcher at Google since 2016.

Research

Youssef's key work focuses on pervasive and mobile computing with a focus on location determination systems and algorithms. His Ph.D. thesis gave the design and implementation of the Horus WLAN location determination system. The Horus system is considered to be one of the earliest WiFi-based tracking systems and the first probabilistic scheme.
In 2007, he was the main author of the ACM MobiCom Vision/Challenges paper that introduced the concept of device-free localization, one of the still current hot topics in location tracking research. Traditional tracking techniques require attaching a device to the tracked entity. Device-free localization allows detecting, tracking, and identifying objects without any attachment, by analyzing their effect on the ambient wireless signals. This paradigm-shifting approach for localization opens the door for many novel applications such as intrusion detection, smart homes, ubiquitous gesture-controlled IoT devices, among many others.
In 2012, he introduced a vision and system for leveraging crowdsourced phone sensor data to automatically construct indoor floorplans by a building’s everyday users. This provided a solution to one of the hurdles of ubiquitous indoor localization, but it also sparked follow-on work by others that builds different layers of semantics, e.g. points of interest and place functionalities. This work won the 2013 COMESA Innovation Award.
In 2013, he introduced the DejaVu system for providing energy-efficient highly-accurate GPS replacement. GPS-replacement systems usually traded accuracy for energy-efficiency. DejaVu uses the energy-efficient phone sensors to detect virtual landmarks in the physical space that can be used to accurately pinpoint the user location. The results in the paper, that won the best paper award at the ACM SGSpatial'13 conference, show that DejaVu can obtain better accuracy than GPS, while having an order of magnitude saving in energy. DejaVu also won the 2015 COMESA Innovation Award.
In 2015, his WiGest gesture recognition system leverages the concept sensor-less sensing to provide a calibration-free high-accuracy gesture recognition system for any Wi-Fi-enabled device. The idea is to leverage the changes in the ambient WiFi signals to detect the gesture the user is performing with her phone. The system can achieve high accuracy without any pre-training.
In 2019, his paper in the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine extends the concept of sensor-less sensing to include sensing indirectly through the energy harvested from the Internet of Things devices. The key concept is that the motion of persons and their hands will affect the energy harvested from the IoT devices and hence, by analyzing the changes in the harvested energy, one can sense the environment without using and custom sensors.

Awards and honors

In 2019, Youssef became the first computer scientist in the Middle East and Africa to be named a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery for his contributions to location tracking algorithms.
He was also named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in the same year.
In 2017, he received the :ar:جوائز الدولة المصرية#جائزة الدولة للتفوق|Egyptian State Excellence Award.
In 2015, he was named an Distinguished Scientist of the Association of Computing Machinery. In the same year, he also won the COMESA Innovation Award for his DejaVu GPS-replacement technology. Moreover, he received the Alexandria University Commemorative Medal.
In 2013, he won the COMESA Innovation Award for his CrowdInside system for the automatic construction of indoor floorplans. He also received the Egyptian Dr. Venice Kamel Gouda's Award for Innovative Technologies.
In 2012, he received the :ar:جوائز الدولة المصرية#جوائز الدولة التشجيعية|Egyptian State Encouragement Award for Engineering Sciences.
In 2010, he received the joint TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award for Young Scientists.
In 2004, his thesis work received the Invention of the Year Award from the University of Maryland, College Park.
In 1997, he was awarded Prof. Abdelsamie Moustafa award, and Prof. Naim Aboutaleb award from the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University for being ranked first on the Faculty of Engineering and the Computer and Systems Engineering Department, respectively.
In 1992, he received the Egyptian Ministry of Education Certificate of Honor for being ranked Third Nationwide in the General Secondary School Certificate exam.

Media Coverage

Youssef's research has attracted the general and technical media. On September 21, 2012, his CrowdInside system for the automatic construction of indoor floorplans was featured in the MIT Technology Review Magazine. On July 2, 2012, his Unloc indoor location determination system was cited in the Scientific American Magazine.
On March 10, 2005, his Horus Wi-Fi-based location determination system was cited in the Washington Times Newspaper. Similarly, the Horus system was also cited on June 19 2003 in the New York Times Newspaper.
He is also regularly invited on different Egyptian Talk Shows to talk about his research including Al Qahera Al Youm, Nile TV International, Alexandria Satellite Channel, Egyptian National Satellite Channel.