People of ACM - Julia Gersey

December 18, 2025

How did you become interested in building mobile sensing systems? What is happening now that is transforming this field?

My interest in mobile sensing systems began in high school through hands-on tinkering with Internet-of-Things (IoT) hardware. I built small sensing projects using off-the-shelf components and created simple HTML/CSS dashboards to interact with them. I was quickly fascinated with how these sensing systems can capture the “invisible” and how that data can be surfaced through the web. During my undergraduate studies, I joined Brian Krup p’s (my research advisor) project to build a fine-grained air quality sensing network using IoT devices. That experience showed me how embedded systems can collect environmental data at scale and how impactful it can be to make those measurements accessible to communities through public dashboards. As I became more involved in research, I gravitated toward mobile sensing networks, which address the spatial coverage limitations of static deployments while introducing new constraints in power, connectivity, communication, and robustness. Working through those engineering tradeoffs ultimately pulled me deeper into embedded systems and mobile sensing research.

Today, the field is being transformed by the rise of edge intelligence. We now have sensing nodes the size of a credit card that can run machine learning models, make decisions in real time, and adapt to their environment. Advances in AI are giving us entirely new ways to interpret sensor data and uncover insights faster and more reliably. As computing hardware becomes smaller and more capable, the possibilities for what we can do at the node, cloud, and fleet levels in mobile sensing networks continue to rapidly expand—making this an especially exciting time to be working in the field.

Of your DOE Fellowship you recently wrote, “My work aims to develop systems capable of monitoring and analyzing rapidly changing city conditions to better serve communities.” Will you give an example of one of these applications? Although it can be difficult to predict, what might be some interesting developments in this field that may come to pass in ten years’ time?

One application I have been working on is using vehicles as mobile sensing platforms to capture both visual information and environmental data. By expanding these sensing platforms to be multimodal, we can begin to understand how nearby spaces are being used and what their current conditions are. This can help city planners identify areas that may need maintenance, interventions, or new investments. For instance, mobile data can reveal where urban heat islands (spots in cities that are warmer than their surrounding rural areas) might benefit from more green space, where abandoned buildings or alleys could be repurposed based on surrounding activity levels, or how emissions in industrial corridors evolve over time. These insights are difficult to obtain with static sensors alone, but mobile sensing can provide fine-grained, up-to-date information across an entire city.

Looking ten years ahead, I think we will see sensing networks that are far more adaptive and context-aware. Instead of passively collecting data, these systems will be able to adjust their sensing modalities, sampling rates, and communication strategies based on what is happening around them. This will enable cities of all sizes to gather high-value information with minimal human intervention and dramatically faster turnaround from data collection to actionable insights. As urban areas continue to grow and evolve, these intelligent, responsive sensing systems will play an important role in helping communities make informed decisions about planning, sustainability, and quality of life.

You (along with co-authors Jatin Aggarwal, Jiale Zhang, Jesse R. Codling and Pei Zhang) received a Best Poster Award at this year’s ACM SenSys ’25 conference for your paper “Sniffing Out the City - Vehicular Multimodal Sensing for Environmental and Infrastructure Analysis.” What new innovation did your team present in this paper?

Our work introduced a new approach to mobile sensing by combining two modalities that are usually studied separately: sight (camera-based vision) and smell (various gas and air-quality sensing). By fusing these data streams, we enable the system to “see beyond the camera’s field of view” through gas signatures and also to add visual context to what air-quality sensors detect. In our poster, we showed that as the sensor-equipped vehicle moves through downtown areas with varying levels of pedestrians, traffic, and building density, this cross-modal fusion can reveal meaningful environmental and infrastructural patterns. For example, how emissions from cars, buses, and trucks in the camera frame relate to gas readings, or how urban heat islands emerge in areas with high activity. This fusion allows us to uncover connections between what we see in the built environment and what we measure in the air, giving a more complete understanding of city dynamics.

Why is XRDS such a valuable resource for students? As the new EiC, what are your plans for the publication?

XRDS is an incredibly valuable resource because it is created by students and for students (with amazing support from staff at ACM HQ). It highlights emerging research and perspectives from people who will become the next leaders in computing. The magazine provides a platform where students from all backgrounds and career stages can contribute — whether an undergraduate writing about their first research experience, a PhD student sharing insights from their dissertation, or an industry researcher reflecting on work that will shape future technologies. XRDS captures the energy, curiosity, and innovation happening across computing today, making it a unique space within ACM.

As the new EiC, I want to broaden the magazine’s reach and formats while staying true to its student-centered mission. One of my goals is to introduce a “maker” section that highlights exploratory, hands-on projects, tools, and prototypes—work that may not yet be formal research but can inspire new ideas and seed future directions. I also hope to launch a debate-style format where researchers with different approaches or viewpoints can present their perspectives side-by-side, giving readers a more nuanced understanding of complex topics. Research is rarely about a single “right” answer; it is about exploration, disagreement, and discovery. Creating space for that discourse is essential as we continue pushing the boundaries of computing in this new era.