HotSense
ACM International Workshop on Thermal Sensing and Computing
Co-located with ACM MobiCom 2025 | November 8, 2025 | Hong Kong, China
Visible Light
Thermal Infrared
Co-located with ACM MobiCom 2025 | November 8, 2025 | Hong Kong, China
Thermal is the new visual—with privacy. As smart systems move ever deeper into our homes, hospitals, factories, and cities, the demand for privacy-preserving, spatially rich, and context-aware sensing has never been greater. HotSense is the first dedicated workshop to explore the full stack of thermal sensing and computing, bringing together researchers from mobile computing, embedded systems, HCI, computer vision, robotics, and AI to chart this fast-emerging frontier.
From gesture recognition to depth estimation, from indoor localization to human-machine interaction, from health monitoring to emergency response, thermal sensing offers a powerful yet underexplored modality for ubiquitous computing. With increasingly accessible and compact sensors (e.g., FLIR, Melexis, Meridian), researchers are deploying thermal systems where traditional vision and RF sensing fall short, whether in low-light, occluded, or privacy-sensitive environments.
HotSense @ MobiCom 2025 offers a timely, interdisciplinary venue to shape the future of thermal computing:
At its core, HotSense aims to catalyze a vibrant research community around thermal perception and computation—one that spans algorithms, hardware, systems, and real-world applications.
🔥 Thermal sensing is hot! Join us at HotSense @ MobiCom 2025, and help redefine how intelligent systems perceive and interact with the physical world—with thermal.
HotSense is the first workshop dedicated to the full spectrum of thermal sensing and computing across mobile, embedded, and intelligent systems. We welcome original research papers, position papers, and early-stage exploratory work that examine the design, implementation, analysis, and application of thermal sensing systems.
While particular attention will be given to low-cost, low-resolution thermal arrays, the workshop encourages broader contributions across the hardware–algorithm–application stack, including novel sensing modalities, computing frameworks, and cross-disciplinary applications.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
If you have any questions, please contact Chengxiao via email.
Abs: The emerging Industry 4.0 of smart technologies calls for a future with scalable human-robot social interactions. It is expected that one in ten vehicles will be automated by 2030, and millions of robot helpers will be serving people. Each of these intelligent agents will ‘observe and see’ its surrounding scene through advanced sensors, to form a computer vision and make decisions without human intervention. Traditional cameras cannot function in the dark. State-of-the-art sensors (such as LiDAR, radar, and sonar) to enhance the camera vision face difficulties when the number of intelligent agents scales up. Thermal imaging could be a new frontier in machine perception but suffers from the ‘ghosting effect’. Based on our recent research, this talk will elaborate on the mechanism of the ghosting effect and how HADAR, as featured in Nature (2023), can overcome it, enabling high-resolution night vision for future machine perception.
Bio: Dr. Fanglin Bao is an assistant professor in the School of Science, Westlake University, focusing on information physics and optics. Dr. Bao received his B.S. in Physics (2011) and Ph.D. in Optics (2016) from Zhejiang University. He studied quantum vacuum fluctuations, worked out the renormalization of the Casimir force in inhomogeneous systems, and discovered the inhomogeneity-induced Casimir transport phenomenon — a nanoscale ‘maglev train’ based on quantum levitation. Before joining Westlake University in 2024, he was a postdoctoral scholar and later a research scientist at Purdue University, where he worked on quantum optical sensing. He developed heat-assisted detection and ranging (HADAR), quantum-accelerated imaging, and adaptive photon-thresholding detection. For the series of work on HADAR, Dr. Bao was recognized with awards, including the Intelligent Computing Innovator in 2023 by MIT Technology Review.
Bio: Dr. Stanislav Markov is a Scientist and Director at Meridian Innovation, where he leads multidisciplinary efforts in advancing thermal imaging technologies—ranging from silicon MEMS hardware to software-driven thermal data analytics for both consumer and commercial applications. His expertise extends across nanoelectronic semiconductor devices and materials, leveraging advanced modeling techniques such as molecular dynamics, atomistic DFTB + NEGF quantum transport, and statistical reliability analysis in CMOS technologies. In addition to his academic contributions, he has deep experience in scientific software development, TCAD/EDA tools, RTL design and verification for digital ASICs, SoCs, and FPGAs, as well as low-level hardware programming and process control system design.
The University of Hong Kong, HK SAR, China
University of Oxford, UK
University of California, Riverside, USA
A pioneering developer of advanced CMOS Thermal Imaging solutions
