The paper “Whole-Home Gesture Recognition Using Wireless Signals” by CSE’s Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyam Gollakota, and Shwetak Patel has received the Best Paper Award from Mobicom 2013.
The paper describes WiSee, a novel interaction interface that leverages ongoing wireless transmissions in the environment (e.g., WiFi) to enable whole-home sensing and recognition of human gestures. In a nutshell, your motion distorts the ambient signal in ways that can be detected, interpreted, and used to control devices.