Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Rajalakshmi Nandakumar (University of Washington) - Computational Wireless Sensing at Scale

Speaker: Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, University of Washington

Talk Title: Computational Wireless Sensing at Scale

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Computational wireless sensing is an exciting field of research where we use wireless signals from everyday computing devices to enable sensing. The key challenge is to enable new sensing capabilities that can be deployed at scale and have an impact in the real world.

In this talk, I will focus on the two unique approaches that I pursued to enable sensing at scale. The first is to transform existing smart devices such as smartphones into active sonar systems to enable mobile health and user interaction applications. In particular, I will talk about contactless sensing of physiological signals like breathing using off-the-shelf smartphones that can be used to detect potentially life-threatening conditions such as opioid overdoses as well as sleep apnea. The second approach is to design new low power wireless technologies that can enable IoT sensing on everyday objects on a large scale by addressing power and size constraints. Here, I will talk about our technology that achieves 3D localization and tracking of sub-centimeter sized devices that enables applications ranging from user interaction to precision agriculture.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium


Biography: Rajalakshmi Nandakumar is a Ph.D. candidate at the Paul G. Allen School of computer science of University of Washington. Her research focuses on developing wireless sensing technologies that enable novel applications in various domains including mobile health, user interfaces and IoT networks. She developed the first contactless smartphone based sleep apnea diagnosis system that was licensed by ResMed Inc. and now used by millions of users for sleep staging. She was recognized with the Paul Baran Young Scholar award by the Marconi Society in 2018 and also named as the rising star in EECS by MIT. She has first author papers in top medical journals including Science translational medicine as well as computer science venues (CHI, SIGCOMM, SenSys, MobiCom, MobiSys). Her research was awarded multiple accolades and nominations including MobiSys 2015 best paper nominee, CHI 2016 Honorable mention award and SenSys 2018 best paper award.

Host: Ramesh Govindan

Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair