Moustafa Youssef (Arabic: مصطفى يوسف) is an Egyptian computer scientist who was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2019[5] for contributions to wireless location tracking technologies and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2019[6] for contributions to location tracking algorithms.

Device-free localization allows detecting, tracking, and identifying objects without any attachment, by analyzing their effect on the ambient wireless signals.

This paradigm-shifting approach for localization opens the door for many novel applications such as intrusion detection, smart homes, and ubiquitous gesture-controlled IoT devices, among many others.

In 2012, he introduced a vision and system for leveraging crowdsourced phone sensor data to automatically construct indoor floorplans by a building’s everyday users.

[15] This provided a solution to one of the hurdles of ubiquitous indoor localization, but it also sparked follow-on work by others that build different layers of semantics, e.g. points of interest and place functionalities.

DejaVu uses the energy-efficient phone sensors to detect virtual landmarks in the physical space that can be used to accurately pinpoint the users location.

The idea is to leverage the changes in the ambient WiFi signals to detect the gesture the user is performing with their phone, a phenomenon called inverse synthetic-aperture radar.

[3] In 2004, his thesis work received the Invention of the Year Award[4] from the University of Maryland, College Park.

On September 21, 2012, his CrowdInside system for the automatic construction of indoor floorplans was featured in the MIT Technology Review Magazine.

[22] On March 10, 2005, his Horus Wi-Fi-based location determination system was cited in the Washington Times Newspaper.