Electrical engineering PhD student Xubin Fang won first place in the Lehigh Valley IEEE Graduate Student Contest during the IEEE Engineering Week banquet in February. Fellow electrical engineering PhD student Uzma Khan earned second place.
The poster session, held on Lehigh’s Mountaintop Campus, provides a platform for students to showcase their research, exchange ideas, and gain feedback from peers, faculty, and industry experts.
Fang’s poster, titled “Observer Reasoning about an Agent’s Method for Deceptive Path Planning,” explored how an autonomous observer can detect deceptive strategies.
Fang’s work takes a novel approach by focusing on the observer’s perspective in adversarial reasoning. While most research in deceptive path planning aims to help an agent mislead an observer, Fang’s study investigates how an observer can infer an agent’s true intentions despite deception. His data-driven classification model allows the observer to analyze partial path information and predict the agent’s real goal—an approach with potential applications in robotics, security, and AI-driven surveillance systems.
Fang credits his advisor, Rick S. Blum, Lehigh’s Robert W. Wieseman Endowed Professor in Electrical Engineering, who leads the Signal Processing and Communication Research Lab; the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Brian M. Sadler, a senior research fellow in the Center for Autonomy at the University of Texas at Austin for providing the guidance and support that helped shape his research.
Moving forward, he is expanding on this work by exploring how factors like an agent’s starting position and proximity to its goal affect an observer’s ability to reason about deception. He is also refining his model to improve its predictive accuracy and further enhance adversarial reasoning techniques in autonomous systems.
Khan’s poster, titled “Scalable Hardware Platform for Massive MIMO in Underwater Acoustic Communications,” focuses on advancing beyond simulations by developing a low-power, high-data-rate wireless communication system for underwater real-time video transmission and networking.
Khan’s work addresses the significant challenges of low bandwidth and limited transmission distance in underwater environments, where frequencies are typically in the kHz range. She has developed a prototype hardware platform that utilizes beamforming—a technique that directs signals strategically—to improve transmission efficiency and reduce interference. By employing multiple low-power transducers, her system can achieve spatial multiplexing for simultaneous communication with multiple users or diversity gain for longer-distance transmission, all while maintaining data rates and power efficiency and eliminating the need for costly cables.
Khan acknowledges the invaluable guidance and support of her advisor, Yahong Rosa Zheng, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a leading expert in underwater wireless communications, as well as her co-author Xiyuan Zhu and the ECE department.
Looking ahead, Khan plans to further refine her prototype and test its performance in real-world underwater environments, paving the way for more efficient, reliable, and transformative underwater communication technologies.
—Student writer Safwan Hoque '26 contributed to this story