Swarun Kumar Associate Professor, Affiliated Faculty Office 4113 Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center Email swarun@cmu.edu Phone (412) 268-1892 Department Electrical and Computer Engineering Computer Science Department: Affiliated Research Interests Distributed Systems Mobile and Pervasive Computing Networking Systems Research/Teaching Statement My research interests are in the area of computer networks with a special focus on wireless networks and mobile systems. Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth in wireless connectivity, enabling a host of new applications and services. My research designs and builds systems that address fundamental technical challenges impeding the growth of wireless networks. It explores new connections between wireless networking and other disciplines, such as robotics, radar, computer vision, security and signal processing. My research has two broad focus areas: Faster Wireless Networks: Interference is the fundamental problem facing mobile networks, particularly with rising demand for data in this ever-growing sector of the global economy. Past work develops interference management solutions that need new hardware to be deployed. In contrast, we develop solutions that use mobility, signal processing and software architecture to effectively cancel interference on commodity Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Our clean-slate designs achieve an order-of-magnitude gain in network throughput. Novel Services for the Internet of Things: Wireless networks have traditionally been used as a means to communicate data. But beyond communication, there is an enormous potential to use our existing wireless infrastructure for novel services. In particular, we design solutions that use information embedded in wireless signals to develop new services for smart environments and the Internet of Things. My research has built a range of such services including: GPS for indoors, better navigation for robotic networks, wireless security and safer driverless cars, to name a few. Publications Conference Battery-free Wideband Spectrum Mapping using Commodity RFID Tags 2023 • Proceedings of the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MOBICOM • 120-135 Ibrahim M, Bansal A, Yuan K, Kumar S, Steenkiste P Conference High Resolution Point Clouds from mmWave Radar 2023 • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation • 4135-4142 Prabhakara A, Jin T, Dast A, Bhatt G, Kumarit L, Soltanaghai E, Bilmest J, Kumar S, Rowe A Journal Article Locating Everyday Objects Using NFC Textiles 2023 • Communications of the ACM • 66(10):107-114 Wang J, Zhang J, Li K, Pan C, Majidi C, Kumar S Conference Navigating Soft Robots through Wireless Heating 2023 • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation • 2598-2605 Song Y, Zadan M, Misra K, Li Z, Wang J, Majidi C, Kumar S Journal Article PLatter 2023 • GetMobile • 26(4):19-22 Zhang J, Soltanaghai E, Balanuta A, Grimsley R, Kumar S, Rowe A
Conference Battery-free Wideband Spectrum Mapping using Commodity RFID Tags 2023 • Proceedings of the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MOBICOM • 120-135 Ibrahim M, Bansal A, Yuan K, Kumar S, Steenkiste P
Conference High Resolution Point Clouds from mmWave Radar 2023 • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation • 4135-4142 Prabhakara A, Jin T, Dast A, Bhatt G, Kumarit L, Soltanaghai E, Bilmest J, Kumar S, Rowe A
Journal Article Locating Everyday Objects Using NFC Textiles 2023 • Communications of the ACM • 66(10):107-114 Wang J, Zhang J, Li K, Pan C, Majidi C, Kumar S
Conference Navigating Soft Robots through Wireless Heating 2023 • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation • 2598-2605 Song Y, Zadan M, Misra K, Li Z, Wang J, Majidi C, Kumar S
Journal Article PLatter 2023 • GetMobile • 26(4):19-22 Zhang J, Soltanaghai E, Balanuta A, Grimsley R, Kumar S, Rowe A