Rate My Professor Yu Zhang

Yu Zhang serves as a Lecturer in Computing, specializing in IoT and Networking, within the School of Computing at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is affiliated with the IoT research lab led by Professor Tao Gu. Zhang holds a PhD in Computer Science from RMIT University, awarded on 30 April 2021 following studies from 1 March 2017 to 8 April 2021, an M.Eng. in Distributed Computing from the University of Melbourne, and a B.Eng. in Software Engineering from Southwest University for Nationalities. Prior to his academic role, he worked as a Senior Software Engineer in the IT industry, bringing practical expertise to his research and teaching. As a member of ACM and IEEE, Zhang contributes to the computing community through high-impact scholarship and supervision of emerging researchers.

His research focuses on mobile computing, wireless sensor networks, embedded systems, on-device machine learning, and Internet of Things applications. Zhang has published extensively in premier venues such as MobiCom, SenSys, UbiComp, IPSN, INFOCOM, ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Notable publications include "Hypergraph disentangling and cross-level contrastive learning for recommendation" (2026), "Accurate blood pressure measurement using smartphone's built-in accelerometer" (June 2024), "A multi-UAV assisted task offloading and path optimization for mobile edge computing via multi-agent deep reinforcement learning" (September 2024), "Exploring a secure device pairing using human body as a conductor" (December 2024), and "FLoRa+: energy-efficient, reliable, beamforming-assisted, and secure over-the-air firmware update in LoRa networks" (May 2024). With 239 citations on Google Scholar, his work influences advancements in deep learning for sensing and IoT. Zhang supervises the CSIRO Data61 PhD Scholarship project for Gao (2024-2027) and participates in ARC Linkage Projects on connectivity. He also serves as guest editor for a special issue on drone communications and teaches units including COMP2270 Networking and Cloud Computing, COMP8280 Mobile Data Networks, COMP3100 Distributed Systems, and COMP8230 Mining Unstructured Data.