WAVES Lab
Wireless, Acoustic, Vision, and Embodied Systems Laboratory
University of Pennsylvania
Welcome to the WAVES Lab! We are a research group at Penn Engineering, led by Prof. Mingmin Zhao.
Wireless, acoustic, and visual signals share a common physical foundation: all of them propagate as waves, encoding the physical world as they move through it. Some of them we see and hear every day; others, like radio, lie entirely beyond human senses. Radio waves travel through walls, smoke, and darkness, capturing what no camera can. Sound waves similarly carry rich information about our surroundings, and more importantly, they shape how we perceive and experience the world. We build embodied systems that use these waves to perceive, communicate, and act in the physical world.
We study how different forms of wave propagation can help robots and humans understand the physical world. We model how signals propagate and interact with their surroundings, design machine learning grounded in that physics, and build systems from embedded sensors to neural networks and real-world applications. In the long run, we aim to advance physical AI, building embodied intelligence that understands the physical world through waves.
We are proud to be part of the PRECISE Center and the GRASP Lab.
Interested in joining the WAVES Lab? We welcome PhD, Master’s, and undergraduate researchers. Join us »
Our Current Research Topics:
01
Superhuman Perception with RF Signals
RF sensing beyond human vision: high-fidelity imaging, scene understanding, and robust perception where cameras fail.
02
mmWave Sensing and Communication
Millimeter-wave technologies for sensing, communication, and their convergence in future wireless systems.
03
Acoustic & Audio Intelligence
How sound propagates, what it reveals, and how machines can understand and generate it.
04
Digital Health
Contactless sensing and computational biomarkers for continuous, everyday health monitoring.
05
Immersive Media & Content Creation
Generative models of motion, sound, and dynamic worlds for immersive experiences and content creation.
Videos Explaining Our Research:
Latest News:
- Aug 2026 A warm welcome to Zeyu (Jessie) Jin, visiting PhD student from Tsinghua University — great to have you with us!
- Aug 2026 The lab is growing! Daniel Cai joins us this fall as a PhD student — welcome aboard, Daniel!
- Jun 2026 Haowen Lai is interning at Google and Zitong Lan is interning at Microsoft this summer!
- May 2026 WaveVerse is headed to ICML 2026 — generating entire 4D worlds and the RF signals that ripple through them!
- May 2026 Congratulations to Shibo (Robin) Jin and Yiwei Tang on completing their Master’s — Robin continues at Penn for a PhD, and Yiwei heads to Duke University!
- May 2026 Congratulations to Dr. Xin Yang (postdoc 2023–2025) on joining HKUST (Guangzhou) as an Assistant Professor!