David Chu | Google, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Microsoft

Hiring for internships and fulltime positions. Contact me about the opportunity.

After many great years at Microsoft Research, I have moved to Google. Stay tuned…

My research interests are in mobile computing, virtual reality, augmented reality, cyber-physical systems, sensors, ubiquitous computing and applied machine learning. I received the Best Paper award in MobiSys 2015, the Best Paper nomination in MobiSys 2012, the Best Demo award in MobiSys 2014, and the Best Demo nomination in SenSys 2011. I have served as the PC Chair of ISMAR 2018 and NetGames 2017, and as the General Chair of HotMobile 2016. My work has appeared in such places as TechCrunch, PC Magazine, GameSpot, Ars Technia, Slashdot, The Verge [1,2,3], Engadget [1,2], Yahoo and Wired. At Microsoft, I have contributed to Windows and Windows Phone, Xbox and HoloLens.

The main objective of my work is the pursuit of perception-aligned mobile systems. Human attention is a scarce resource, but when available, it can also be wonderfully perceptive. My research seeks to answer the question:

Can we build mobile systems that align with the speed of human perception?

This is challenging as devices continue to shrink, increasingly enveloping and even embedding within the human body. A theme threaded throughout my work is interactive small data: how can inferences over personal data streams aid systems in interactive sub-second decision making? It turns out that not only are we amazingly perceptive beings, we are also creatures conditioned by habit. By appropriately leveraging statistical insights about our past behavior, mobile devices can in fact be well-positioned to service future needs, even at demanding interactive line rates.

LinkedIn | C.V. (Last updated: May 2016)

Recent & Selected Publications

[MobiSys2017] Accelerating Mobile Sensing Algorithms through On-Chip GPU Offloading Petko Georgiev, Nicholas Lane, Cecilia Mascolo, David Chu.
[PG2016] Proxy-guided Image-based Rendering for Mobile Devices Bernhard Reinert, Johannes Kopf, Tobias Ritschel, Eduardo Cuervo, David Chu, Hans-Peter Seidel.
[MobiSys2016] FlashBack: Bringing Immersive Virtual Reality to Mobile Devices through Aggressive Rendering Memoization Kevin Boos, David Chu, Eduardo Cuervo.
[SoCC2015] dJay: Enabling High-density Multi-tenancy for Cloud Gaming Servers with Dynamic Cost-Benefit GPU Load Balancing Sergey Grizan, David Chu, Alec Wolman, Roger Wattenhofer.
[UbiComp2015] Prime: A Framework for Scaling Co-located Multi-Device Apps David Chu, Zengbin Zhang, Alec Wolman, Nic Lane.
[MobiSys2015] Outatime: Using Speculation to Enable Low-Latency Continuous Interaction for Mobile Cloud Gaming Kyungmin Lee, David Chu, Eduardo Cuervo, Johannes Kopf, Yury Degtyarev, Sergey Grizan, Alec Wolman, Jason Flinn. Best Paper
[UbiComp2014] Leveraging Directional Antenna Capabilities for Fine-Grained Gesture Recognition Pedro Melgarejo, Xinyu Zhang, Parmesh Ramanathan, David Chu.
[MobiSys2014] Demo: DeLorean: Using Speculation to Enable Low-Latency Continuous Interaction for Mobile Cloud Gaming Kyungmin Lee, David Chu, Eduardo Cuervo, Johannes Kopf, Alec Wolman, Jason Flinn. Best Demo
[UbiComp2013] Practical Prediction and Prefetch for Faster Access to Applications on Mobile Phones Abhinav Parate, Matthias Böhmer, David Chu, Deepak Ganesan, Benjamin Marlin.
[UbiComp2013] Understanding User Behavior at Scale in a Mobile Video Chat Application Lei Tian, David Chu, Qin Lv, Richard Han, Shivakant Mishra.
[UbiComp2012] Helping Mobile Apps Bootstrap with Fewer Users Xuan Bao, Aman Kansal, Romit Roy Choudhury, Paramvir Bahl, David Chu, Alec Wolman.
[MobiSys2012] SwordFight: Enabling a New Class of Phone-to-Phone Action Games on Commodity Phones Zengbin Zhang, David Chu, Xiaomeng Chen, Thomas Moscibroda. Best Paper Nominee
[MobiSys2012] Fast App Launching for Mobile Devices Using Predictive User Context Tingxin Yan, David Chu, Deepak Ganesan, Aman Kansal, Jie Liu.
[SenSys2011] Demo: Sword Fight With Smartphones Zengbin Zhang, Jian Qiu, David Chu, Thomas Moscibroda. Best Demo Nominee
[SenSys2011] On the Feasibility of Real-Time Phone-to-Phone 3D Localization Jian Qiu, David Chu, Xiangying Meng, Thomas Moscibroda.
[SenSys2011] Balancing Energy, Latency and Accuracy for Mobile Sensor Data Classification David Chu, Nicholas Lane, Tsung-te Lai, Cong Pang, Fan Li, Xiangying Meng, Qing Guo, Feng Zhao.
[HotOS2011] Mobile Apps: It's time to move up to ConDOS David Chu, Aman Kansal, Jie Liu, Feng Zhao.

See more publications…

Current Projects

Mobile App Streaming

Masking latency by speculating on future events for highly interactive cloud-based remote rendering. Using statistical inference over likely user actions, state space approximation, and fast state checkpoint and restore, we show it is possible to provide the experience of low latency for mobile clients even if their latency to the datacenter is over 100ms. The technology is demonstrated on two of the most demanding interactive applications today: twitch-based gaming and head-mounted virtual reality.

Mobile Motion Gaming (MMG)

Seeking to offer Kinect-like experiences using only mobile devices, leading to new mobile gaming experiences. Key technical achievements include development of fast, accurate and robust phone-to-phone distance measurement system, and a 3D phone-to-phone measurement techniques. Several innovative games, including SwordFight, have been prototyped.

Context Data OS (ConDOS)

Investigating the impact of context data on the mobile operating system. Core contributions include identifying the benefits of OS managed context, and uses of context by the OS. As a concrete example, faster app launching based on context signals such as location and temporal access patterns is investigated in detail.

See more projects…

Professional Service

Program Committee (pc) member, unless otherwise noted

2019: MobiCom
2018: ISMAR (pc co-chair), MobiCom, USENIX ATC
2017: MobiCom, MobiSys, WWW, HotMobile, IMWUT (associate editor), NetGames (pc co-chair)
2016: HotMobile (general chair), MobiCom (panelist), MobiSys (external pc), Urban-IoT, WearSys
2015: MobiSys, SenSys, UbiComp, DCOSS, IPSN (demo co-chair), MobiGames (pc co-chair), WearSys
2014: MobiSys, UbiComp (pc and awards committee), Urban-IoT, MARS (panelist)
2013: SenSys, HotMobile
2012: MobiSys (demo co-chair, Ph.D. forum panelist), MobiGames, PhoneSense (pc co-chair)

Selected Talks

2017: The Virtual Reality of Mobile Computing, invited talk
- MobiSys 2017
2016: Toward Immersive Mobile Virtual Reality, invited talks
- HotWireless 2016
- Columbia University
- Google Seattle
- Google NYC
- MobiCom 2016 (panelist)
2016: Wear is Mobile Virtual Reality Going: Getting to Visual Quality, Responsiveness and Mobility for Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays, WearSys 2016, keynote
2016: Immersive Virtual Reality on Mobile Devices via Compute Offload and Caching, University of Washington/Northwest Database Society, invited talk
2016: Mobile Virtual Reality
- Microsoft Research Database seminar talk
- Microsoft Research Natural Interaction seminar talk
2016: In Pursuit of Low-Latency Interactions on Mobile Devices, invited talks
- University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- University of Wisconsin
- Princeton
- ETH Zurich
- University of Massachusetts, Amherst
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- University of Virginia
2014: Systems and Networking Challenges in App Streaming, University of Southern California, invited talk