Danny Yuxing Huang — RouterSense
The Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) at NYU Tandon welcomes you to attend the lecture "RouterSense: A Low-Cost, Unobtrusive, Privacy-Respecting Way to Monitor Health from Everyday Internet Use at Scale" by Danny Yuxing Huang, assistant professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and at CUSP at NYU Tandon. This event, hosted as part of the Fall 2025 Urban Science Research Seminar Series, will be held in Room 1201 at 370 Jay Street.
About the Lecture
RouterSense: A Low-Cost, Unobtrusive, Privacy-Respecting Way to Monitor Health from Everyday Internet Use at Scale
Many health conditions, including neurological ones such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can show up years before diagnosis in the form of small changes in sleep, activity, and daily routines. Today, most tools to measure these changes—like fitness trackers, phone apps, or surveys—are costly, inconvenient, easy to forget, and difficult to scale.
RouterSense offers a different approach. Instead of relying on wearables or self-reports, RouterSense uses the existing internet infrastructure in people’s homes. By capturing patterns in the everyday internet traffic that flows through phones, computers, and other connected devices, RouterSense can build a picture of daily rhythms without requiring people to do anything after setup. The system is low-cost, easy to configure, and “set-and-forget”, making it practical for long-term use at scale. Importantly, RouterSense only looks at high-level patterns (such as which services are contacted and when), not the content of messages or browsing, ensuring that privacy is protected.
This approach dramatically lowers the cost of monitoring and makes it possible to follow large groups of people over time. Ongoing collaborations include studies with older adults at Oregon Health & Science University and also in collaboration with Harvard University. These projects highlight how RouterSense could open new doors for studying health and detecting early changes in brain and cognitive function and other health conditions in a way that is affordable, unobtrusive, and respectful of people’s privacy.
More info: https://routersense.ai/
About the Speaker
Danny Y. Huang is broadly interested in the research areas of health, AI/ML, privacy (see RouterSense, a passive patient monitoring with just network traffic), and helping victims of tech-enabled abuse (e.g., improving large language models and building tools to detect hidden devices such as IoT Inspector). Before joining NYU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, San Diego, where he wrote a dissertation on using cryptocurrencies to study cyber-criminal activities. He graduated from Williams College (Massachusetts) with a BA in Computer Science.
Visitor Information
This event will be held in Room 1201 at 370 Jay St. Please visit the NYU Tandon website for directions and a campus map. Advance registration through Luma is required for campus access at NYU for external guests.
About the Urban Science Research Seminar Series
The Center for Urban Science + Progress’s annual Research Seminar series features leading voices in the growing field of urban informatics examining real-world challenges facing cities and urban environments around the world. The Fall 2025 series is organized by Assistant Professors Graham Dove, Yuki Miura, Qi Sun, and Takahiro Yabe.