Swarun Kumar
Sathaye Family Foundation Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Office: CIC Rm. 4113,
4720 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Email: swarun [at] cmu [dot] eduAssistant: Dawn Sienko,
Email: dsienko [at] andrew [dot] cmu [dot] edu
Phone: (412)-268-9192
I am the Sathaye Family Foundation Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's ECE department, with an affiliate appointment in the CS department, the HCI Institute and Cylab. My research builds next-generation wireless network protocols and services. I lead the Emerging Wireless Technologies (WiTech) lab at CMU. I am a recipient of the 2024 ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar award, the 2021 SIGBED Early Career Researcher award, the NSF CAREER award and Google Faculty Research award. I received the George Sprowls Award for best Ph.D thesis in Computer Science at MIT and the President of India gold medal at IIT Madras.
NEWS
- Thank you ACM SIGMOBILE for the 2024 SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award
- Jingxian Wang receives the 2023 ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award!
- Two accepted papers at MobiCom'23 on wireless actuation and spectrum sensing!
- Two accepted papers at ICRA'23 on soft robots and mmWave sensing!
- Paper at IPSN'23 on mmWave structural sensing.
- Three Ph.D. students graduate to join as faculty at UW, UCSD and NUS!
- Two papers at IROS'22 on robotic sensing using mmWave and Wi-Fi.
- Our paper on powerline backscatter is accepted at NSDI'22
- Our paper on fast RFID localization is accepted at UbiComp'22
- Two papers at IPSN'22: Milton and SelfieStick!
- Two papers at CHI'22: on Privacy Protective Behavior and Lean Privacy Review (TOCHI)!
- Swarun Kumar receives the CMU-CIT Dean's Early Career Fellowship (2021)
- Akshay Gadre wins the 2021 ACM SIGBED/SIGSOFT Frank Anger Memorial Award
- Our work on NFC Textiles wins Best Paper at IPSN 2021
- Thank you ACM SIGBED for the 2021 SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award
- Two papers accepted at IPSN 2021 on LoRa localization and NFC Textiles
- Vaibhav Singh wins the James Sprague Presidential Fellowship from CIT!
- Two papers accepted at MobiCom 2021 on mm-wave backscatter and cubesat groundstations
- Jingxian Wang receives the Microsoft Ph.D. Fellowship
- Thank you NSF for the CAREER award!
- Gave a talk on future wireless at TEDxPittsburgh!
- [More news...]
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- ToMoBrush: Exploring Dental Health Sensing using a Sonic Toothbrush, Kuang Yuan, Mohamed Ibrahim, Yiwen Song, Guoxiang Deng, Robert A. Nerone, Suvendra Vijayan, Akshay Gadre, and Swarun Kumar, UbiComp 2024 [WEBSITE]
- Wireless Actuation for Soft Electronics-free Robots, Jingxian Wang, Yiwen Song, Mason Zadan, Yuyi Shen, Vanessa Chen, Carmel Majidi and Swarun Kumar, MobiCom 2023 [WEBSITE]
- Battery-free Wideband Spectrum Mapping using Commodity RFID Tags, Mohamed Ibrahim, Atul Bansal, Kuang Yuan, Swarun Kumar and Peter Steenkiste, MobiCom 2023 [WEBSITE]
- Platypus: Sub-mm Micro-Displacement Sensing with Passive Millimeter-wave Tags As Phase Carriers, Thomas Horton King, Jizheng He, Chun-Kai (Sean) Yao, Akarsh Prabhakara, Mohamad Alipour, Swarun Kumar, Anthony Rowe and Elahe Soltanaghai, IPSN 2023 [WEBSITE]
- Navigating Soft Robots through Wireless Heating, Yiwen Song, Mason Zadan, Kushaan Misra, Zefang Li, Jingxian Wang, Carmel Majidi and Swarun Kumar, ICRA 2023 [WEBSITE]
- High Resolution Point Clouds from mmWave Radar, Akarsh Prabhakara, Tao Jin, Arnav Das, Gantavya Bhatt, Lilly Kumari, Elahe Soltanaghai, Jeff Bilmes, Swarun Kumar and Anthony Rowe, ICRA 2023 [WEBSITE]
- The Interplay of Clustering and Evolution in the Emergence of Epidemics on Networks, Mansi Sood, Rashad Eletreby, Swarun Kumar, Chai Wah Wu, Osman Yagan, ICC 2023 [WEBSITE]
- NFCapsule: An Ingestible Sensor Pill for Eosinophilic Esophagitis Detection Based on Near-field Coupling, Junbo Zhang, Gaurav Balakrishnan, Sruti Srinidhi, Arnav Bhat, Swarun Kumar and Christopher Bettinger, SenSys 2022 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- PLatter: On the Feasibility of Building-scale Power Line Backscatter, Junbo Zhang, Elahe Soltanaghaei, Artur Balanuta, Reese Grimsley, Swarun Kumar and Anthony Rowe, NSDI 2022 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Exploring mmWave Radar and Camera Fusion for High-Resolution and Long-Range Depth Imaging, Akarsh Prabhakara (Co-Primary), Diana Zhang (Co-Primary), Chao Li, Sirajum Munir, Aswin Sankaranarayanan, Anthony Rowe and Swarun Kumar, IROS 2022 [PAPER] [SLIDES] [WEBSITE]
- Toolbox Release: A WiFi-Based Relative Bearing Sensor for Robotics, Ninad Jadhav, Weiying Wang, Diana Zhang, Swarun Kumar and Stephanie Gil, IROS 2022 [WEBSITE]
- Ultra Low-Latency Backscatter for Fast-moving Location Tracking, Jingxian Wang, Vaishnavi Ranganathan, Jonathan Lester and Swarun Kumar, UbiComp 2022 [WEBSITE]
- SelfieStick: Towards Earth Imaging from a Low-Cost Ground Module Using LEO Satellites, Vaibhav Singh, Osman Yagan and Swarun Kumar, IPSN 2022 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- MiLTOn: Sensing Product Integrity without Opening the Box using Non-Invasive Acoustic Vibrometry, Akshay Gadre, Deepak Vasisht, Nikunj Raghuvanshi, Bodhi Priyantha, Manikanta Kotaru, Swarun Kumar and Ranveer Chandra
, IPSN 2022 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Exploring the Needs of Users for Supporting Privacy-protective Behavior in Smart Homes, Haojian Jin, Boyuan Guo, Rituparna Roychoudhury, Yaxing Yao, Swarun Kumar, Yuvraj Agarwal and Jason Hong, CHI 2022 [WEBSITE]
- Lean Privacy Review: Collecting Users' Privacy Concerns of Data Practices at a Low Cost, Haojian Jin, Hong Shen, Mayank Jain, Swarun Kumar, and Jason Hong, TOCHI 2021 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- TagFi: Locating Ultra-Low Power WiFi Tags Using Unmodified WiFi Infrastructure, Elahe Soltanaghaei, Adwait Dongare, Akarsh Prabhakara, Swarun Kumar, Anthony Rowe and Kamin Whitehouse, UbiComp 2021 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- OwLL: Accurate LoRa Localization using the TV Whitespaces, Atul Bansal, Akshay Gadre, Vaibhav Singh, Anthony Rowe, Bob Iannucci and Swarun Kumar, IPSN 2021 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Locating Everyday Objects using NFC Textiles, Jingxian Wang (Co-Primary), Junbo Zhang (Co-Primary), Ke Li, Chengfeng Pan, Carmel Majidi and Swarun Kumar, IPSN 2021 (Best Paper Award) [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Millimetro: mmWave Retro-Reflective Tags for Accurate, Long Range Localization, Elahe Soltanaghaei (Co-Primary), Akarsh Prabhakara (Co-Primary), Artur Balanuta (Co-Primary), Matthew Anderson, Jan M. Rabaey, Swarun Kumar and Anthony Rowe, MobiCom 2021 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- A Community-Driven Approach to Democratize Access to Satellite Ground Stations, Vaibhav Singh, Akarsh Prabhakara, Diana Zhang, Osman Yagan and Swarun Kumar, MobiCom 2021 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Quick (and Dirty) Aggregate Queries on Low-Power WANs, Akshay Gadre, Fan Yi, Anthony Rowe, Bob Iannucci and Swarun Kumar, IPSN 2020 (Best Paper Award) [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Full Duplex Radios: Are we there yet?, Vaibhav Singh (Co-Primary), Akshay Gadre (Co-Primary) and Swarun Kumar, HotNets 2020 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Cross Technology Distributed MIMO for Low Power IoT, Revathy Narayanan, Swarun Kumar and C. Siva Ram Murthy, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 2020 [WEBSITE]
- Joltik: Enabling Energy-Efficient "Future-Proof" Analytics on Low-Power Wide-Area Networks, Mingran Yang, Junbo Zhang, Akshay Gadre, Zaoxing Liu, Swarun Kumar and Vyas Sekar, MobiCom 2020 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Osprey: A mmWave Approach to Tire Wear Sensing, Akarsh Prabhakara, Vaibhav Singh, Swarun Kumar and Anthony Rowe, MobiSys 2020 (Best Paper Honorable Mention) [PAPER] [SLIDES] [WEBSITE]
- A Cloud-Optimized Link Layer for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks, Artur Balanuta, Nuno Pereira, Swarun Kumar and Anthony Rowe, MobiSys 2020 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Evolutionary Adaptations on Clustered Contact Networks, Rashad Eletreby, Yong Zhuang, Swarun Kumar and Osman Yagan, NetSci 2020 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Quick (and Dirty) Aggregate Queries on Low-Power WANs, Akshay Gadre, Fan Yi, Anthony Rowe, Bob Iannucci and Swarun Kumar, IPSN 2020 (Best Paper Award) [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Millimeter-Wave Full Duplex Radios, Vaibhav Singh, Susnata Mondal, Akshay Gadre, Milind Srivastava, Jeyanandh Paramesh and Swarun Kumar, MobiCom 2020 [PAPER] [SLIDES] [WEBSITE]
- Frequency Configuration for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks in a Heartbeat, Akshay Gadre, Revathy Narayanan, Anh Luong, Swarun Kumar, Anthony Rowe and Bob Iannucci, NSDI 2020 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- RFID Tattoo: A Wireless Platform for Speech Recognition , Jingxian Wang, Chengfeng Pan, Haojian Jin, Vaibhav Singh, Yash Jain, Jason Hong, Carmel Majidi and Swarun Kumar, UbiComp 2020 (Best Wearables Long Paper) [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- You foot the bill! Attacking NFC with passive relays, Yuyi Sun, Swarun Kumar, Shibo He, Jiming Chen and Zhiguo Shi, IEEE IoT Journal 2020 [WEBSITE]
- Silver-Coated PDMS Beads for Soft, Stretchable, and Thermally Stable Conductive Elastomer Composites , Chengfeng Pan, Yun Sik Ohm, Jingxian Wang, Michael J. Ford, Kitty Kumar, Swarun Kumar, and Carmel Majidi, ACS applied materials and interfaces 2019
- Sozu: Self-Powered Radio Tags for Building-Scale Activity Sensing , Yang Zhang, Yasha Iravantchi, Haojian Jin, Swarun Kumar, and Chris Harrison, UIST 2019 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Perspective: eliminating channel feedback in next generation cellular networks , Deepak Vasisht, Swarun Kumar, Hariharan Rahul and Dina Katabi, ACM SIGCOMM CCR 2019
- Software Defined Cooking using a Microwave Oven , Haojian Jin, Jingxian Wang, Swarun Kumar and Jason Hong, MobiCom 2019 (ACM GetMobile Research Hightlight) [PAPER] [SLIDES] [WEBSITE]
- On the Feasibility of Wi-Fi Based Material Sensing , Diana Zhang, Jingxian Wang, Junsu Jang, Junbo Zhang, Swarun Kumar, MobiCom 2019 [PAPER] [SLIDES] [WEBSITE]
- Pushing the Range Limits of Commercial Passive RFIDs , Jingxian Wang, Junbo Zhang, Rajarshi Saha, Haojian Jin, Swarun Kumar, NSDI 2019 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Revisiting Software Defined Radios in the IoT Era , Revathy Narayanan, Swarun Kumar, HotNets 2018
- WiSh: Towards a Wireless Shape-aware World , Haojian Jin, Jingxian Wang, Zhijian Yang, Swarun Kumar, Jason Hong, MobiSys 2018 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Charm: Exploiting Geographical Diversity Through Coherent Combining in Low-Power Wide-Area Networks , Adwait Dongare, Revathy Narayanan, Akshay Gadre, Artur Balanuta, Anh Luong, Swarun Kumar, Bob Iannucci, Anthony Rowe, IPSN 2018 (Best Paper Award) [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- A Deep Learning Approach to IoT Authentication , Rajshekhar Das, Akshay Gadre, Shanghang Zhang, Swarun Kumar and Jose Moura, ICC 2018 [PAPER] [WEBSITE]
- Towards Wearable Everyday Body-Frame Tracking , Haojian Jin, Zhijian Yang, Swarun Kumar, and Jason Hong, UbiComp 2018 (Best Demo Honorable Mention) [PAPER] [SLIDES] [WEBSITE]
- Empowering Low-Power Wide Area Networks in Urban Settings , Rashad Eletreby, Diana Zhang, Swarun Kumar, and Osman Yagan, SIGCOMM 2017 [PAPER] [SLIDES] [WEBSITE]
- Eliminating Channel Feedback in Next-Generation Cellular Networks , Deepak Vasisht, Swarun Kumar, Hariharan Rahul and Dina Katabi, SIGCOMM 2016 (Best Paper Award, GetMobile Research Highlight)
- Decimeter-Level Localization with a Single WiFi , Access Point, Deepak Vasisht, Swarun Kumar and Dina Katabi, NSDI 2016
TEACHING
- 18-213/613 (Computer Systems), Fall 2021
- 18-441/741 (Computer Networks), Spring 2018-21
- 18-859G (Wireless Networks and Mobile Systems -- DARPA SC2 Edition), Fall 2017-19
- 18-345 (Intro to Telecommunication Networks), Spring 2017
- 18-859F (Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing), Spring 2016
Ph.D STUDENTS
- Akarsh Prabhakara (co-advised with Prof. Anthony Rowe)
- Junbo Zhang
- Atul Bansal (co-advised with Prof. Bob Iannucci)
- Yiwen Song
- Kuang Yuan
- Yawen Liu
- Veronica Muriga (co-advised with Prof. Akshitha Sriraman and Prof. Assane Gueye)
Ph.D. ALUMNI
- Diana Zhang (Graduated in 2021 to join John Hopkins University - Applied Physics Lab)
- Akshay Gadre (Graduated in 2022 to join as Assistant Professor at University of Washington)
- Haojian Jin (co-advised with Prof. Jason Hong; Graduated in 2022 to join as Assistant Professor at UC San Diego)
- Jingxian Wang (Graduated in 2022 to join Microsoft Research and later as Assistant Professor at NUS)
- Vaibhav (co-advised with Prof. Osman Yağ Graduated in 2023 to join Apple)
POST-DOCTORAL ALUMNI
- Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed (now at HP Labs)