UC Merced Magazine | Volume XX, Issue VI

Members of the PANS Lab: (back row left to right) Ph.D. students Shubham Rohal, Dong Yoon Lee and Shangjie Du and high school intern Joshua Zhang; (front row left to right) undergraduate student intern Victoria Zepeda and Professor Shijia Pan

One research group at UC Merced is using arti cial intelligence to make technology more powerful and unobtrusive. e Pervasive Autonomous Networked Systems Lab at UC Merced, led by computer science and engineering Professor Shijia Pan, focuses on using machine learning to change how society addresses challenges for healthier and more sustainable conditions that make life easier. Her goal, according to her lab site, is to “make the world a smarter place.” Over the past couple of years, the PANS Lab’s research has evolved into incorporating AI into embedded systems around us, a concept the researchers call the Arti cial Intelligence of ings (AIoT). “When we design sensors, we try to make them a seamless part of the objects that people use,” Pan said. Her philosophy follows the vision of Mark Weiser, former chief technology o cer at Xerox, o en called the father of ubiquitous computing, who said, “ e most profound technologies are those that disappear.”

More Efficient Shopping One of the projects Pan and her students are working on borrows from origami — the Japanese art of paper folding. It integrates origami metastructure made from conductive materials into commonly used elastic surfaces, such as mats and liners, to transform these surfaces into sensors.

(Continued on page 16)

A plug-and-play sensor used to remotely detect movements of older adults

15

UC MERCED MAGAZINE // ucmerced.edu