Congratulations to Dr. Afnan Ahmad, who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in Earth and Space Science at York University on August 20, 2026. The oral examination was held online over Zoom.
His dissertation, “Online Adaptive Deep Learning for Multi-Sensor WiFi Indoor Localization,” tackles a long-standing problem in indoor positioning: Wi-Fi signals change over time, so a model trained one year slowly loses accuracy the next. Afnan’s work makes two main contributions:
- Label-free online adaptation. A deep model fuses Wi-Fi signal strength with phone inertial and magnetometer data, and adjusts its features while it is being used, without new labelled positions.
- A multi-year indoor benchmark. Data from four York University buildings collected in 2021 and 2022, with HoloLens 2 augmented-reality ground truth, to test how well models hold up across years.
We thank the examining committee, Prof. Mojgan Jadidi (Chair), Prof. Bilal Farooq (Toronto Metropolitan University, External Examiner), Prof. Regina Lee, Prof. Hina Tabassum and Prof. Manos Papagelis, for their careful reading and thoughtful questions.
Afnan began his Ph.D. in the lab in 2017, studying part-time, and was co-supervised. Congratulations, Dr. Ahmad!
