I am an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University, where I direct the Intelligent Mobile and Embedded Computing (IMEC) Lab. We work on a variety of exciting problems in embedded AI, mobile and embedded systems, and smart health.
Our goal is to realize truly intelligent, health-aware, and safer environments by embedding intelligent perception and reasoning into common objects and devices found all around us and utilizing them in efficient ways to provide useful services and improve quality of life. Our work spans a number of domains, including cyber-physical systems, edge computing, signal processing, machine learning, data science, wearables, robotics, health, etc.
Prior to Northwestern, I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley (2023). I received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University (2022) and the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University (2016).
Please visit the IMEC Lab’s website for updated information on my news, publications, projects, and students.
Selected Publications
TW-CRL: Time-Weighted Contrastive Reward Learning for Efficient Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Yuxuan Li, Yicheng Gao, Ning Yang, Stephen Xia
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026, Oral
MAESTRO : Adaptive Sparse Attention and Robust Learning for Multimodal Dynamic Time Series
Payal Mohapatra, Yueyuan Sui, Akash Pandey, Stephen Xia, Qi Zhu
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025, Spotlight
FlexiFly: Interfacing the Physical World with Foundation Models Empowered by Reconfigurable Drone Systems
Minghui Zhao, Junxi Xia, Kaiyuan Hou, Yanchen Liu, Stephen Xia, Xiaofan Jiang
ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2025
TRAMBA: A Hybrid Transformer and Mamba Architecture for Practical Audio and Bone Conduction Speech Super Resolution and Enhancement on Mobile and Wearable Platforms
Yueyuan Sui, Minghui Zhao, Junxi Xia, Xiaofan Jiang, Stephen Xia
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 2024
Anemoi: A Low-cost Sensorless Indoor Drone System for Automatic Mapping of 3D Airflow Fields
Stephen Xia, Minghui Zhao, Charuvahan Adhivarahan, Kaiyuan Hou, Yuyang Chen, Jingping Nie, Eugene Wu, Karthik Dantu, Xiaofan Jiang
International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), 2023
Teaching
Winter 2026: COMP_ENG 346: Microcontroller System Design
Fall 2025: COMP_ENG 365/465: Internet-of-Things Sensors, Systems, and Applications
Spring 2025: COMP_ENG 395/495: Embedded Artificial Intelligence
Winter 2025: COMP_ENG 346: Microcontroller System Design
Fall 2024: ELEC_ENG/COMP_ENG 495: PhD Life Skills Building
Spring 2024: COMP_ENG 395/495: Embedded Artificial Intelligence
Winter 2024: COMP_ENG 346: Microcontroller System Design