One More Half-marathon: Garmin Durham 1/2

Posted on May 10, 2026 by admin

My third half marathon in the last two years – May 2026 Garmin Durham 1/2 marathon – done!

Lovely race; running through the Durham Bulls stadium is a very special experience, and so is finishing on Duke’s football stadium.

Problem with finishing on this stadium: then you have to climb all of the stadium’s stairs, on shaky, wooden legs. But the unique experience is worth it. It reminded me of some of the truly unique races I have done before, like a race that goes through the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River and a race on the airstrip of the Teterboro Airport. Huge thanks to the organizers for bringing these one-of-a-kind events to life.

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Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech (CHCI@VT) Headliner Seminar

Posted on May 2, 2026 by admin

Possible at Last: Using Large Multimodal Models to Evaluate and Secure Mixed-Reality Experiences – this was the title of the talk I gave as part of the VT Center for Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Sincere thanks to the organizers for the opportunity to share my perspective: we are finally, finally at the cusp of being able to provide real-time oversight of AR experiences.

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2025 in the Duke I3T Lab: Students, Systems, and Community

Posted on January 5, 2026 by admin

In 2025, two Duke I3T Lab members received their PhDs and moved on to exciting careers in industry: Dr. Sarah Eom joined Exponent as a Biomedical Engineering Consultant; Dr. Lin Duan joined NVIDIA as an XR-AI Engineer. There were several exciting developments in the careers of our alums, too: Dr. Ying Chen joined Penn State University as an Assistant Professor. We enjoyed getting to catch up with her at IEEE VR and ACM VRST 2025.

Duke I3T Lab at IEEE VR 2025. Proud advisor moment: sitting in the audience while my former PhD student presented work from her own research group.

Duke I3T Lab members published across multiple key venues, including IEEE TVCG, IEEE VR, IEEE ISMAR,  ACM VRST, AACL Findings, and IEEE Internet Computing, and received multiple awards. Yanming Xiu received the IEEE ISMAR Best Paper Award, the IEEE ISMAR Doctoral Consortium Best Presentation Award, and Duke ECE Research Retreat Best Presentation Runner-up recognition. Under Yanming’s guidance, lab’s high-school affiliates Joshua Chilukuri and Shunav Sen received the 2025 IEEE Universal Augmented Interaction Workshop Best Paper Award.

This year also brought important new support for our work. The $743K NSF TIP Breaking Low Award will support our work on low-latency multi-user XR for rehabilitation. The $250K DARPA Director’s Fellowship will allow us to expand our effort in runtime oversight of AR experiences.

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Posted in Academia, Achievement, Career and Leadership, Duke University, Funding and Awards, Highlights, Industry, Industry impact, Publications and Demonstrations, Research, Students and Mentorship, Undergraduate research, Undergraduate research | Leave a comment

From Gaming Gear to ICU Rehabilitation: Bringing XR into Clinical Practice

Posted on December 27, 2025 by admin

The November 2025 issue of Duke I/O Magazine includes an article titled “Transforming Reality: How Gaming Gear is Impacting Health Care,” featuring a lovely summary of our ongoing collaboration with the Duke University School of Nursing. Together, we are designing XR rehabilitation platforms for patients receiving long-term care in the ICU.

Excerpt from the Duke I/O article describing our joint work with DUSON

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Edge Computing’s Next Decade: Intelligent Spatial Systems – and a Responsibility to Get Them Right

Posted on December 24, 2025 by admin

It was my genuine pleasure to get to share my thoughts about the past and future of edge computing at the ACM Symposium on Edge Computing 2025 panel, “Looking Back and Moving Forward: 10 Years of Edge Computing.”

My highest-level takeaway: we are entering the era of human-facing, intelligent spatial systems.  Continue reading →

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80 Races Completed!

Posted on November 16, 2025 by admin

By 2015, I had completed 50 races – reflections, from back then, are here. Ten years and five months later — also, two kids, one global pandemic, and one conquered tenure track later — I have now completed 80.

My 80th race, the RDC Half Marathon, went great! I am not fast by the standards of where I was at the time of my 50th race — pre-kids, pre-pandemic, pre-tenure track. But I ran the half-marathon distance 8 minutes faster than last year. I ran it in the middle of grading, travel, kids’ illnesses, and crushing grant deadlines. And somehow, by some miracle, I even placed second in my age group. Apparently, at small races like this one, the 8 minutes I shaved off my time from 2024 to 2025 make the difference between being middle-of-the-pack and being in the top five in the age group. A pleasant surprise to be taking home this, very minor, award, which happens to be my first race award since 2020.

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IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award

Posted on October 18, 2025 by admin

Our paper titled “Detecting Visual Information Manipulation Attacks in Augmented Reality: A Multimodal Semantic Reasoning Approach” has been recognized with the Best Paper Award at IEEE ISMAR 2025, the premier XR conference. Heartfelt congratulations to the lead author, PhD student Yanming Xiu, who also received the 2025 IEEE ISMAR Doctoral Consortium Best Presentation and the Best Paper Award from a workshop co-located with IEEE ISMAR, IEEE Universal Augmented Interaction Workshop. Way to go Yanming!  

Continue reading →

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Three Papers Appearing at IEEE ISMAR 2025

Posted on September 1, 2025 by admin

Three Duke I3T papers are appearing at IEEE ISMAR 2025:

The custom rig Duke I3T PhD student Tianyi Hu designed for “head-to-head” comparison of the tracking performance of different XR devices. More information in our paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08642

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Invited Talk at Augmented World Expo (AWE) USA 2025

Posted on July 2, 2025 by admin

Speaking at Augmented World Expo (AWE) USA, a premier industry XR for a second time – what a thrill! Last time I presented at AWE was back in 2021, when my talk was about edge- and IoT-supported AR.

This time I gave a talk titled “Possible at Last: Using Vision-Language Models to Evaluate and Secure Mixed Reality Experiences.” The video of my presentation and my slides are available below. Happy to answer any follow-on questions via e-mail, provided on the last slide of the slides PDF below.

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Gorgeous Saint-Malo; Thanks to IEEE VR 2025 for Bringing us There

Posted on April 10, 2025 by admin

I try to go for brief outdoor runs whenever I travel for work. In colder climates, that requires packing the suitcase a bit tighter, but it is generally worth it, as it gives me a fresh perspective on the places I visit.

3.2 miles along the English Channel, as recorded in Polar Flow.

Recently, a run like this was especially delightful in Saint-Malo, the location of IEEE VR 2025. Off-season (early March), Saint-Malo was quiet and surprisingly affordable, allowing for a stay near the beach and runs right along the English Channel, surrounded by dramatic, gorgeous scenery. Cold? Yes. Windy? Also, yes. Worth it? 100% and then some.

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