sigmobile dissertation award

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Award for advancing the sensing capabilities of in-ear devices

Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Tue, 11/07/2023 - 12:51

A researcher into the use of wearable devices for health monitoring has just won the 2023 ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation  Runner-up Award.

Dr andrea ferlini  - who completed his phd here with professor cecilia mascolo  - was announced as the sole runner-up for this year's dissertation award by the association for computing machinery (acm), the world's largest association of computing professionals. he received the award for his dissertation ' for advancing the state of art of sensing in ear-worn devices '..

Andrea, pictured above centre, is the only researcher outside the USA to have won this award.

The SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation award is given annually to recognise excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in the field of mobile computing and wireless networks. Every year, one winner and up to two runners-up are recognised by the Special Interest Group for their work in this area.

Andrea, who is now a Research Scientist with Nokia Bell Labs, works in the area of sensing in wearable devices that can be used for health monitoring.

Using in-ear devices for health monitoring This Department and Nokia Bell Labs have been working in collaboration on the development of what are called 'earables' - ear-worn devices like wireless earbuds. 

Nokia Bell Labs developed a new platform for earable technologies, and the University of Cambridge is one of a number of universities working on it. Researchers here are focusing on how to process and understand the information coming out of the earables and how to make mobile computing systems more efficient and secure.

In his doctoral research Andrea was attempting to solve a long-standing, hard problem of motion estimation using only the sensors found in earables.   

His PhD supervisor, Professor Cecilia Mascolo , says Andrea's doctoral research has helped advance our understanding of the capabilities and limitations of a range of sensors in earables, including accelerometers, magnetometers and in-ear microphones.

"The contributions within his dissertation were really innovative and two of the chapters have already been published at top-tier SIGMOBILE conferences, namely MobiSys and Mobicom," she says. 

"An impressive achievement" Professor Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Chair of the ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award Committee, said the committee had been "impressed with the new custom hardware to extend the sensing capability of such devices".

He added: "We received many strong nominations this year, but Andrea's work stood out in its depth and strength of contributions. Congratulations to him on this impressive achievement!"

Andrea says that he feels "honored and humbled" to have his worked recognised in this way. He adds: "I hope this will be the cornerstone of my future research and career, and I really want to thank Cecilia, my supervisor, who advised me and kindly steered me when needed since the first day we met."

Well done Andrea. And congratulations also to Dissertation Award Winner Jinxian Wang, who was chosen for his doctoral dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University, 'For advancing the science and interdisciplinary applications of wireless energy transfer'.

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ACM MobiCom'17

Rockstar'17: Shyam Gollakota

2016 Test-of-Time Paper Awardees

ACM SIGMOBILE is the international professional organization for scientists, engineers, executives, educators, and students dedicated to all things mobile. Some of the activities of SIGMOBILE and its members include:

• Performing research in the theory and practice of all areas related to the mobility of systems, users, data, and computing;
• Expanding the evolution of portable computers and wireless networks;
• Supporting the convergence of mobility, computing, and information organization; and
• Developing improved access, services, management, and applications for mobile computing and communications.

In light of recent events, SIGMOBILE steering committee would like to reaffirm SIGMOBILE’s commitment to inclusivity and the EC's support for #ShutDownSTEM.

SIGMOBILE supports ACM's statement on inclusivity and promotes inclusivity through our broadening participation program. Yet we also recognize that this has not been enough - particularly for our black colleagues.

Please do reach out if you would like to discuss or offer suggestions. We hope you will join us in making SIGMOBILE an even better place for all.

Call for Nominations - SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award

2023 sigmobile awards announced, 2023 test-of-time paper awards announced, call for nominations - test-of-time award, sigmobile student community grant - call for proposals, 2022 sigmobile award winners, 2021 sigmobile award winners, mobisys, mobicom and sensys 2020 videos on sigmobile youtube channel, sigmobile broadening participation committee is formed, ▶ upcoming events, ▶ research highlights, ebp: a wearable system for frequent and comfortable blood pressure monitoring from user's ear (mobicom'19), low-latency speculative inference on distributed multi-modal data streams (mobisys 2021), msail: milligram-scale multi-modal sensor platform for monarch butterfly migration tracking (mobicom 2021), software-defined cooking using a microwave oven (mobicom'19), headfi: bringing intelligence to all headphones (mobicom 2021), this is your president speaking: spoofing alerts in 4g lte networks (mobisys'19), bioface-3d: continuous 3d facial reconstruction through lightweight single-ear biosensors (mobicom 2021), liquid testing with your smartphone (mobisys'19), animal-borne anti-poaching system (mobisys'19), 3d localization for sub-centimeter sized devices (sensys'18), saturn: a thin and flexible self-powered microphone designed on the principle of triboelectric nanogenerator (ubicomp'18), skycore: moving core to the edge for untethered and reliable uav-based lte networks (mobicom'18).

• More data, better farms
• MobiCom'17 Best Video
• MobiSys'17 Best Video
• MobiCom'16 Best Video
• MobiCom'15 Best Video

UW ECE alum Vikram Iyer earns SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award for engineering systems inspired by nature

September 8, 2022

UW ECE alum Vikram Iyer takes inspiration from biological phenomena and transforms them into programmable systems, like Beetlecam (pictured), a wireless vision system that can be mounted on live beetles. Photo by Mark Stone / University of Washington

Adapted from an article by Kristin Osborne, UW CSE

When bees leave the hive, they can spend all day flying and foraging on a single “charge” owing to their ability to convert fats and carbohydrates that store significantly more energy than batteries. When other insects traverse the landscape, the structure of their retinas combined with the motion of their heads enable them to efficiently take in and process visual information. And when dandelions shed their seeds, structural variations ensure that they are dispersed through the air over short and long distances to cover maximum ground.

Recent UW ECE graduate and Allen School professor Vikram Iyer is not a biologist, but he takes inspiration from these and other biological phenomena to engineer programmable systems and devices that can go where computers have been unable to go before — and solve problems more efficiently and safely than previously thought possible. During his time at UW ECE as a Ph.D. student, Iyer imagined how the so-called internet of biological and bio-inspired things could transform domains ranging from agriculture to wildlife conservation. His results recently inspired the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing to recognize him with the SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award for “creative and inspiring work that shows how low-power sensing, computing and communication technologies can be used to emulate naturally-occurring biological capabilities.”

“Building bio-inspired networking and sensing systems requires expertise across multiple disciplines spanning computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and biology,” said UW ECE adjunct associate professor and Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota , Iyer’s Ph.D. advisor. “I think this thesis breaks new ground by designing programmable technologies that not only mimic nature but also takes the crucial step of integrating electronics with living organisms.”

Gollakota and Iyer worked together on a series of projects that gave new meaning to the term “computer bug” — but in this case, they took their lessons from the kind of bugs with legs and wings. For one of their early projects, Living IoT , the team developed a scaled down wireless sensing and communication platform that was light enough to be worn by bumblebees in flight. The tiny sensor backpacks incorporate a rechargeable power source, localization hardware, and backscatter communication to relay data once the bee returns to the hive in a form factor topping out at a mere 102 micrograms. Later, when the northern giant hornet — colloquially referred to as the “murder hornet” — was sighted in northwest Washington, the state’s Department of Agriculture enlisted Iyer’s help in designing and affixing tiny tracking devices onto a live specimen so that agency staff could track it back to the nest.

After seeing their concept of on-board sensors for insects take flight, Iyer and his colleagues came back down to earth to develop a tiny wireless camera inspired by insect vision . Their system, which they dubbed “ Beetlecam ,” offered a fully wireless, autonomously powered, mechanically steerable vision system that imitates the head motion of insects. By affixing the camera onto a moveable mechanical arm, the team could mimic insect head motion to capture a wide-angle view of the scene and track the movement of objects while expending less energy — and at a higher resolution. The complete vision system, which can be controlled via smartphone, is small enough to mount on the back of a live beetle or insect-sized terrestrial robots such as their own prototype built to demonstrate the capabilities.

Many sensors, including those designed by Iyer and his collaborators, still require a method of transportation, be it beetle, bee, or robot. Iyer and his collaborators wondered if they could design sensors capable of delivering themselves. The answer, to borrow a phrase from singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, was blowing in the wind — in the form of dandelion seeds. Iyer and the team developed a wireless, solar-powered sensing and communication system that can be carried aboard flexible, thin shapes . The shapes are designed to carry the sensors through air and land upright 95% of the time, relying on a structure reminiscent of the bristle-like shape of dandelion seeds — with some necessary modifications to accommodate the weight of the attached sensor. The team also demonstrated that, by modulating the porosity and diameter of the structures, they can ensure the sensors are dispersed at various distances like the seeds.

Unlike many miniaturized systems, Iyer’s flora- and fauna-inspired projects favor designs that rely on off-the-shelf parts instead of requiring custom-built circuits.

“In addition to showing how we can take lessons from nature to advance a new category of bioinspired computing, my work demonstrates how we can use programmable general-purpose components to rapidly develop these novel miniaturized wireless systems,” Iyer explained. “This approach has the potential to exponentially increase innovation in domains such as smart agriculture, biological tracking, microrobots, and implantable devices. My goal is to enable anyone with a computer engineering background to advance miniaturized systems without the need to also develop custom silicon.”

Iyer, who earned his Ph.D. from UW ECE before joining the Allen School faculty last year, previously earned a Paul Baran Young Scholar Award from the Marconi Society and his work was voted Innovation of the Year in the 2021 GeekWire Awards. He is the third student researcher advised by Gollakota to win this award in recent years, following in the footsteps of Allen School alum Rajalakshmi Nandakumar (Ph.D., ‘20), now a faculty member at Cornell University, and ECE alum Vamsi Talla (Ph.D., ‘16), who was co-advised by Allen School and UW ECE professor Joshua Smith and is currently CTO of UW spinout Jeeva Wireless.

Congratulations, Vikram!

Be boundless

© 2024 University of Washington | Seattle, WA

Mobile Intelligence Lab

Vikram iyer joins uw cse as professor and wins the acm sigmobile dissertation award 2022.

Ex-Ph.D. student, Vikram Iyer, was awarded the SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award for “creative and inspiring work that shows how low-power sensing, computing and communication technologies can be used to emulate naturally-occurring biological capabilities.”

Congrats Vikram on an inspiring Ph.D. thesis and joining UW CSE as professor

Vikram is the third student researcher from our group to win this award in recent years, following in the footsteps of Allen School alum Rajalakshmi Nandakumar (Ph.D., ‘20), now a faculty member at Cornell University, and ECE alum Vamsi Talla (Ph.D., ‘16), who was co-advised by Allen School and ECE professor Joshua Smith .

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Adjunct Assistant Professor Jingxian Wang wins ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award 2023

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NUS Computing Adjunct Assistant Professor Jingxian Wang wins ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD dissertation thesis, “Blind Wireless Beamforming to Power, Heat, and Move.”

The award recognises the top doctoral candidates with excellent thesis research in the field of mobile computing and wireless networks. Dr. Wang will be attending the ACM Mobicom conference in Spain this coming October to receive the award.

While most of the wireless systems research in the past decade has been focused on designing more efficient communication and novel sensing applications, not much has been focused on wireless systems’ capability to generate energy. The precise control of wireless signals, which is known as beamforming, has been an important solution in improving the wireless communication system’s throughput and signal-noise ratio. However, these systems have not directly translated to innovations in wireless systems for heating and delivering energy more broadly.

Dr. Wang’s dissertation taps into the potential of wireless systems by building a suite of blind beamforming systems that deliver precisely controllable wireless energy to battery-free devices and objects such as RFID tags.

“I started with the creation of PushID, an innovative beamforming system specifically designed to power battery-free RFID tags on a large scale. Drawing inspiration from the principles underlying PushID, I conceptualised and developed Software-defined Cooking. This initiative reimagines the conventional microwave oven system, enabling programmable and precision-controlled heating trajectories for various foods, including pizza. I extended the same heating principle to design WASER, a technology that uses wireless beamforming to actuate movements in electronic-free soft robots. In addition to these, my research demonstrated the potential of novel battery-free soft materials in efficient wireless energy harvesting, coupled with their capabilities for advanced sensing.”

Dr. Wang believes that the multidisciplinary methodology he employed in his dissertation was what made it stand out: “I’ve interwoven elements from artificial intelligence, robotics, materials science, and wireless computer systems in my research. I believe this multidisciplinary methodology is what distinguishes my work and gives it a unique edge.”

His work sparked various industrial collaborations, namely with Microsoft, Bridgestone, Bosch, and Pitt+Me. One of his inventions was patented by Microsoft, with the HoloLens team exploring its integration into future mixed-reality experiences.

Besides this recognition, his paper also won various best paper and demo awards in the field of mobile computing, human-computer interaction, and cyber-physical systems.

On receiving this recognition, he expressed: “It’s an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. Given the highly competitive nature of this award and the outstanding group of PhD students emerging in the SIGMOBILE field every year, across a variety of domains from edge computing to wireless to ubiquitous computing, being chosen for this award is indeed a significant honour.”

“Figuring out how to make a distinctive impact in the field was indeed challenging. My strategy was to interact with large industrial companies and potential clients to identify real-world issues. After that, I would devise cutting-edge techniques to address these problems. Additionally, I’ve always been keen on exploring knowledge beyond my specific research area and comfort zone. I often read papers and participate in workshops and conferences outside my primary field of study, as I believe these are the arenas where inspiration for novel ideas can often strike.”

Despite his numerous achievements, Dr. Wang is far from resting on his laurels. He is deeply passionate about fostering the next generation of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. To this end, he actively seeks to recruit new PhD students into his research group. “Innovation often springs from diverse perspectives converging to solve complex problems,” he asserts. “I am particularly keen on welcoming students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including artificial intelligence, signal processing, materials science, and electronics.”

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A feature and a bug: vikram iyer earns sigmobile doctoral dissertation award for engineering systems inspired by nature.

When bees leave the hive, they can spend all day flying and foraging on a single “charge” owing to their ability to convert fats and carbohydrates that store significantly more energy than batteries. When other insects traverse the landscape, the structure of their retinas combined with the motion of their heads enable them to efficiently take in and process visual information. And when dandelions shed their seeds, structural variations ensure that they are dispersed through the air over short and long distances to cover maximum ground. 

Allen School professor Vikram Iyer is not a biologist, but he takes inspiration from these and other biological phenomena to engineer programmable systems and devices that can go where computers have been unable to go before — and solve problems more efficiently and safely than previously thought possible. During his time as a University of Washington Ph.D. student, Iyer imagined how the so-called internet of biological and bio-inspired things could transform domains ranging from agriculture to wildlife conservation. His results recently inspired the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing to recognize him with the SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award for “creative and inspiring work that shows how low-power sensing, computing and communication technologies can be used to emulate naturally-occurring biological capabilities.”

“Building bio-inspired networking and sensing systems requires expertise across multiple disciplines spanning computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and biology,” said Allen School professor Shyam Gollakota , Iyer’s Ph.D. advisor. “I think this thesis breaks new ground by designing programmable technologies that not only mimic nature but also takes the crucial step of integrating electronics with living organisms.”

Gollakota and Iyer worked together on a series of projects that gave new meaning to the term “computer bug” — but in this case, they took their lessons from the kind of bugs with legs and wings. For one of their early projects, Living IoT , the team developed a scaled down wireless sensing and communication platform that was light enough to be worn by bumblebees in flight. The tiny sensor backpacks incorporate a rechargeable power source, localization hardware, and backscatter communication to relay data once the bee returns to the hive in a form factor topping out at a mere 102 micrograms. Later, when the northern giant hornet — colloquially referred to as the “murder hornet” — was sighted in northwest Washington, the state’s Department of Agriculture enlisted Iyer’s help in designing and affixing tiny tracking devices onto a live specimen so that agency staff could track it back to the nest. 

After seeing their concept of on-board sensors for insects take flight, Iyer and his colleagues came back down to earth to develop a tiny wireless camera inspired by insect vision . Their system, which they dubbed “ Beetlecam ,” offered a fully wireless, autonomously powered, mechanically steerable vision system that imitates the head motion of insects. By affixing the camera onto a moveable mechanical arm, the team could mimic insect head motion to capture a wide-angle view of the scene and track the movement of objects while expending less energy — and at a higher resolution. The complete vision system, which can be controlled via smartphone, is small enough to mount on the back of a live beetle or insect-sized terrestrial robots such as their own prototype built to demonstrate the capabilities.

Many sensors, including those designed by Iyer and his collaborators, still require a method of transportation, be it beetle, bee, or robot. Iyer and his collaborators wondered if they could design sensors capable of delivering themselves. The answer, to borrow a phrase from singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, was blowing in the wind — in the form of dandelion seeds. Iyer and the team developed a wireless, solar-powered sensing and communication system that can be carried aboard flexible, thin shapes . The shapes are designed to carry the sensors through air and land upright 95% of the time, relying on a structure reminiscent of the bristle-like shape of dandelion seeds — with some necessary modifications to accommodate the weight of the attached sensor. The team also demonstrated that, by modulating the porosity and diameter of the structures, they can ensure the sensors are dispersed at various distances like the seeds.

Unlike many miniaturized systems, Iyer’s flora- and fauna-inspired projects favor designs that rely on off-the-shelf parts instead of requiring custom-built circuits.

“In addition to showing how we can take lessons from nature to advance a new category of bioinspired computing, my work demonstrates how we can use programmable general-purpose components to rapidly develop these novel miniaturized wireless systems,” Iyer explained. “This approach has the potential to exponentially increase innovation in domains such as smart agriculture, biological tracking, microrobots, and implantable devices. My goal is to enable anyone with a computer engineering background to advance miniaturized systems without the need to also develop custom silicon.”

Iyer, who earned his Ph.D. from the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering before joining the Allen School faculty last year, previously earned a Paul Baran Young Scholar Award from the Marconi Society and his work was voted Innovation of the Year in the 2021 GeekWire Awards. He is the third student researcher advised by Gollakota to win this award in recent years, following in the footsteps of Allen School alum Rajalakshmi Nandakumar (Ph.D., ‘20), now a faculty member at Cornell University, and ECE alum Vamsi Talla (Ph.D., ‘16), who was co-advised by Allen School and ECE professor Joshua Smith and is currently CTO of UW spinout Jeeva Wireless.

Congratulations, Vikram!

Photo credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington

ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award

Sigmobile 

by Priscilla Capistrano

June 18, 2018

• Fadel Adib Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization
• Seeing Through Walls

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Professor Fadel Adib has won the world's best dissertation award in wireless networks and mobile computing. His thesis showed how we can use Wi-Fi to see through walls and monitor breathing and heart rate using wireless signals. He received the ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award honoring it at MobiSys in Munich. 

Adib and Katabi receive the ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award

MIT professors Fadel Adib and Dina Katabi receive the ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award for their paper, “See Through Walls with WiFi!”

Capturing the Human Figure Through a Wall

Capturing the Human Figure Through a Wall. Fadel Adib, Chen-Yu Hsu, Hongzi Mao, Dina Katabi, Fredo Durand. ACM SIGGRAPH Asia'15, Kobe, Japan, November 2015

Multi-Person Localization via RF Body Reflections

WiTrack: Through-Wall 3D Tracking Using Body Radio Reflections. Fadel Adib, Zach Kabelac, Dina Katabi. Usenix NSDI'15, Oakland, California, May 2015

3D tracking via body radio reflections

Fadel Adib, Zachary Kabelac, Dina Katabi, Robert C. Miller. Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Pages 317-329.

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Prof. Teresa Meng Named Winner of 2018 SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award

Acm sigmobile test-of-time paper award 2019, acm sigmobile test-of-time paper award 2018, the 2017 nsf visioning workshop on extreme wireless networking, prof. norman abramson named winner of 2017 sigmobile outstanding contribution award.

Award to be presented at MobiSys 2017

Dr. Kyle Jamieson Named Winner of the 2018 SIGMOBILE RockStar Award

Sigmobile research highlights.

Papers of high quality and broad appeal will be selected from SIGMOBILE sponsored conferences and will be recommended for consideration for the Communications of the ACM Research Highlights section and published in ACM GetMobile.

SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Awards

The SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time awards recognize papers that have had a sustained and significant impact in the SIGMOBILE community over at least a decade.

The awardees for 2018 have just been announced!

ACM SIGMOBILE is the international professional computing organization for scientists, engineers, executives, educators, and students dedicated to all things mobile. As exemplified by the inaugural test-of-time awards, its members have pioneered:

• medium access mechanisms that underpin Wi-Fi and IoT sensor communications
• positioning systems used in every smart phone and in factories
• file system caching techniques that inspired Dropbox
• congestion control and mesh networking techniques for faster and more ubiquitous wireless broadband data access

MobiCom Best Paper Award

Each year, each of our conferences recognizes the best paper submitted to the conference that year.

ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award

The award will recognize excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in the field of mobile computing and wireless networks.

MobiCom 2017

The 23rd annual international conference on mobile computing and networking.

SenSys 2017

15th acm conference on embedded networked sensor systems, acm sigmobile test-of-time paper award 2017.

The SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Paper Award recognizes papers that have had a sustained and significant impact in the SIGMOBILE community over at least a decade.