Fangqi Liu is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Networked Systems program at the University of California, Irvine, where she conducts research in the Information Systems Group (ISG) and Distributed Systems Middleware (DSM) groups under the guidance of Professor Nalini Venkatasubramanian. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Jilin University in China in 2017 and 2014, respectively. In the summer of 2021, Fangqi worked as a research intern at the Computer Science Lab of SRI International. Her research interests include Vehicular ad hoc networks, mobile sensing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cyber-physical systems (CPS) for monitoring emergency scenarios. Fangqi has authored several publications at conferences such as SMARTCOMP, SRDS, MMSys, and ICCPS.
My research focuses on leveraging mobility to enhance IoT applications and CPS. With modern media-rich sensors generating massive data volumes, local networks are burdened, and long-range data transmission costs increase. To address this challenge, I proposed a backbone network using public transit fleets to assist with data transmission in smart cities. The deployment of roadside network infrastructure and the vehicle data gathering process were optimized to balance data uploading delay/loss with the infrastructure installation cost. Additionally, I designed a mobile CPS for continuous monitoring in high-rise and wildland fires using drones with sensors to collect and transmit data wirelessly. The CPS includes data analysis for detecting critical events, task generation for specifying monitoring requirements, and multi-drone flight planning that guides the motion of drones while considering data coverage, quality, and potential network dysconnectivity. I implemented this CPS and created mock-up architectural and wildland fires testbeds to evaluate the system's performance.