Wireless Sensing & Programmability

For my project IntuWition, I led an effort to bring detection of types of materials — wood, metal, and human — to commodity WiFi cards.

By using a polarimetric approach, we can distinguish materials despite how a near dielectric object might reflect a signal just as strongly as a farther metallic object. Further, commodity WiFi is natively aboard drones and many other autonomous vehicles, and can sense around corners and through obstructions.

Our ongoing work in this space explores ways for a system to respond to changes in the wireless environment after the sensing phase. Details to come!

Emerging Wireless Landscapes

LoRas are low-power radios that can transmit at low data rates across large distances. We see LPWAN devices as being the enablers of future IoT technology -- the medium through which developing "smart" technologies can send sensed data to the cloud. We consider two questions regarding the scaling of LoRa: (1) How to handle collisions with scale, and (2) What information we would be able to gather from collaborative LoRa nodes. This project was presented at Sigcomm 2017, and kick-started our lab's LPWAN initiative.

My ongoing work in this space explores opportunities associated with the emerging ubiquity low-earth-orbit satellites. Details to come!

Integrating Wireless Sensing with Current Dominant Sensing Paradigms

Currently, the dominant sensing paradigms in practice are vision and LIDAR-based systems. For wireless sensing to truly be adopted, it must complement these systems well and I am currently exploring ways to fuse these paradigms effectively.

Next, I am also interested in exploring the policy and spectrum implications of using what are typically communication channels for sensing.