Lei Gao's personal page

About Me

I am Lei Gao(高蕾), a research fellow at Multi-Sensory Devices (MSD) Group in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. I obtained my PhD from University College London under the supervision of Prof. Sriram Subramanian and Prof. Diego Martinez Plasencia. Prior to this, I completed my Master of Engineering at Xidian University and my Bachelor of Engineering at Shandong University.

My research investigates the computational design of novel interactive and intelligent systems that integrate advanced physical actuation mechanisms, multisensory interaction, and algorithmic methods. My current work advances acoustophoresis (i.e., acoustic levitation) by using ultrasonic fields to enable contactless object manipulation, fabrication, and multisensory and haptic interaction.

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Email: lei.gao.20@ucl.ac.uk

Latest News

June 2025: SONARIOS paper got the Best Paper Award at DIS 2025 !
Feb 2025: I got an Early Career Mini-Fellowship from the CS department at UCL !
December 2 2024: I offically started as a research fellow in UCL, new adventures ahead !
November 18 2024: I got my PhD award and my thesis was online ! "Designing and Prototyping Applications Using Acoustophoretic Interfaces".
October 18 2024: I successfully defended my PhD thesis and deeply appreciated my thesis committee members Mike Fraser and Elia Gatti for their insightful feedback and valuable discussions. Also, huge thanks to my amazing supervisors Sriram Subramanian and Diego Martinez Plasencia for supporting and encourging me during this journey !

Publications

SONARIOS: A Design Futuring-Driven Exploration of Acoustophoresis

Ceylan Besevli, Lei Gao, Narsimlu Kemsaram, Giada Brianza, Orestis Georgiou, Sriram Subramanian, Marianna Obrist.

ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS 2025) Best Paper Award

AcoustoBots: A swarm of robots for acoustophoretic multimodal interactions

Narsimlu Kemsaram, James Hardwick, Jincheng Wang, Bonot Gautam, Ceylan Besevli, Giorgos Christopoulos, Sourabh Dogra, Lei Gao, Akin Delibasi, Diego Martinez Plasencia, Orestis Georgiou, Marianna Obrist, Ryuji Hirayama, Sriram Subramanian.

Frontiers in Robotics and AI , 12, 1537101

Paper

Slip-Grip: An Electrotactile Method to Simulate Weight

Hongnan Lin, Lei Gao, Shengsheng Jiang, Hongyu Yue, Ziyi Fu, Jinyi Luo, Chengxiao Wu, Teng Han, Feng Tian, Sriram Subramanian.

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025)

Paper

Ultrasound can deliver chemical stimulants to the skin and modulate their perception

Tor-Salve Dalsgaard, Arpit Bhatia, Lei Gao, Ryuji Hirayama, Sriram Subramanian, Joanna Bergström, Kasper Hornbæk.

Nature Scientific Reports , 15, no. 1(2025): 10297.

Paper

Computational Gastronomy and Eating with Acoustophoresis

Lei Gao, Yutaka Tokuda, Shubhi Bansal, Sriram Subramanian.

Companion Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI Companion 2024)

Paper

StableLev: Data-Driven Stability Enhancement for Multi-Particle Acoustic Levitation

Lei Gao, Giorgos Christopoulos, Prateek Mittal, Ryuji Hirayama, Sriram Subramanian.

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024)

Paper | Video | Video preview

Temporal Acoustic Point Holography

Giorgos Christopoulos, Lei Gao, Diego Martinez Plasencia, Marta Betcke, Ryuji Hirayama, Sriram Subramanian.

ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Conference Papers (SIGGRAPH 2024)

Paper | Video

Designing and Prototyping Applications Using Acoustophoretic Interfaces

Lei Gao.

ACM Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2024)

Paper

DataLev: Mid-air Data Physicalisation Using Acoustic Levitation

Lei Gao, Pourang Irani, Sriram Subramanian, Gowdham Prabhakar, Diego Martinez Plasencia, Ryuji Hirayama.

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023)

Paper | Video | Video preview

DATALEV: Acoustophoretic Data Physicalisation

Lei Gao, James Hardwick, Diego Martinez Plasencia, Sriram Subramanian, Ryuji Hirayama

ACM UIST Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST Demo 2022)

Paper

MAG+: AN EXTENDED MULTIMODAL ADAPTATION GATE FOR MULTIMODA SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

Xianbing Zhao, Yixin Chen, Wanting Li, Lei Gao, Buzhou Tang

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2022)

Paper

Investigating the Effectiveness of Virtual Reality for Culture Learning

Lei Gao, Bo Wan, Gang Liu, Guojun Xie, Jiayang Huang, Guanglan Meng

International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 37:18, 1771-1781, 2021 (IJHCI 2021)

Paper

Automatic Clustering of Different Solutions to Programming Assignments in Computing Education

Lei Gao, Bo Wan, Cheng Fang, Yangyang Li, Chen Chen

ACM Global Computing Education Conference 2019 (CompEd 2019)

Paper