Shyam Gollakota ( Also go by as Shyamnath Gollakota )
Thomas J. Cable Endowed Professor
Paul G. Allen School of CSE
Director of Mobile Intelligence Lab
Room 568, Paul G. Allen Center
University of Washington
Box 352350, Seattle, WA 98195
gshyam@cs.washington.edu
My group is highly inter-disciplinary spanning computer scientists, electrical, mechanical and aerospace engineers and we closely work with biologists and physicians. We are driven by our curiosity to explore science and technology and to tackle hard technical and societal problems. We work across machine learning, signal processing and hardware to build intelligent systems that previously were not thought possible. My group has made multiple inventions including battery-free computers that float in the wind, ambient backscatter, Wi-Fi gestures, battery-free phones, active sonar on smart phones, Internet of bio-inspired and biological things, and created various computing tools for medical diagnostics like contactless breathing and heart rhythm monitoring, blood clot and ear infection testing using smartphones and new-born hearing screening using earbuds.
Inventions from our lab
- Internet of bio-inspired things: computers that float in the wind, UW Robofly, airdropping sensors
- Internet of biological things: bees with sensors, cameras imitating insect eyes, tracking "murder" hornets
- Battery-free computing: phones without batteries, streaming cameras and power over Wi-Fi
- Ambient backscatter: reflecting TV, Wi-Fi, FM, Bluetooth and LoRa signals to communication
- ML for sound: on-device directional hearing, clearbuds for speech enhancement, target sound extraction
- Computing for ear health: ear infections, middle ear disorders, new-born hearing screening
- AI for contactless cardiology: Detecting cardiac arrest, irregular heart rhythm
- Smart speakers and phones as tricorders: breathing monitor, sleep apnea, infant monitoring
- Democratizing underwater technology: underwater messaging and ranging on smartphones and watches
- Blood testing on smartphones: blood clot testing with a single drop, laser speckle with smartphone LiDAR
- Technology for opioid overdoses: detection using smartphones, naloxone wearable injector
- Wireless sensing: Wi-Fi gesture recognition, RFID gestures, imaging using Wi-Fi, tracking fingers tracking, and VR headsets
News
Graduate Students and Mentees
Ph.D. Alumni
- Anran Wang (Ph.D., Sound Life Sciences → Google)
- Vikram Iyer (Ph.D., assistant prof. at University of Washington, Marconi Young Scholar, SIGMOBILE Dissertation award)
- Mehrdad Hessar (Ph.D., OctoML)
- Ali Najafi (Ph.D., VMWare Research)
- Kelly Michaelsen (Mentee, assistant prof at UW Medicine, FAER Grantee)
- Rajalakshmi Nandakumar (Ph.D., assistant Prof at Cornell, Marconi Young Scholar, SIGMOBILE Dissertation award)
- Vamsi Talla (Postdoc, CTO of Jeeva Wireless, SIGMOBILE Dissertation award, SIGCOMM Dissertation award)
- Bryce Kellogg (M.S., co-founder Jeeva Wireless)
- I also worked closely with Vincent Liu (now assistant Prof at U. Penn) and Aaron Parks (co-founder Jeeva Wireless)
Undergraduate Alumni
- Collin Pernu (Starfish space)
- Hans Gaensbauer (MIT grad)
- Hao Zhang (Wisconsin grad)
- Kyle Johnson (UW grad)
- Vicente Arroyos (UW grad)
- Jose Jaime (Sound Life Sciences → Google)
- Ryan Feng (Michigan grad)
- Qifan Pu (Berkeley grad)
Awards
- Moore Inventor Fellow, 2021
- ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 2020
- SenSys Best Paper Award, 2018
- IMWUT Distinguished Paper Award, 2018
- SIGMOBILE RockStar Award, 2017
- Forbes 30 under 30 All-Star Alumni, 2017
- Popular Science Brilliant Ten, 2016
- SIGCOMM Best Paper Award, 2016
- Visionaries 2020, CNN, 2016
- NSDI Best Paper Award, 2016
- 10 Tech Breakthroughs, MIT Tech Review, 2016
- World Technology Award, Communication Technology, 2015
- CoMotion Presidential Innovation Fellow, 2015
- NSF Career Award, 2015
- Alfred Sloan Fellowship, 2015
- Forbes 30 under 30 Energy, 2015
- Technology Review TR35, Innovators Under the Age of 35, 2014
- ACM MOBICOM Best Paper Award, 2013
- ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Award, 2013
- George M. Sprowls Award for Best Dissertation in CS, MIT, 2013
- ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2012
- ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2012
- ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Award, 2011
- ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Award, 2008
- William A. Martin SM Thesis Award, 2008
- IIT Madras Institute Award in Computer Science, 2006
Open source code & Technology transfer
- NeuriCam: Low-power wireless video using super-resolution and colorization (Project page)
Bandhav Veluri, Collin Pernu, Ali Saffari, Josh Smith, Michael Taylor, Shyam Gollakota
ACM MOBICOM 2023
- Real-time target sound extraction (project webpage)
Bandhav Veluri, Justin Chan, Malek Itani, Tuochao Chen, Takuya Yoshioka, Shyam Gollakota
Pre-print 2022
- ClearBuds: Wireless binaural earbuds for learning-based speech enhancement (Project page)
Ishan Chatterjee, Maurchi Kim, Vivek Jayaram, Shyam Gollakota, Ira Kemelmacher, Shwetak Patel, Steve Seitz
ACM MobiSys 2022
- Hybrid neural networks for on-device directional hearing (Project page)
Anran Wang, Maruchi Kim, Hao Zhang, Shyam Gollakota.
AAAI 2022
- Underwater messaging using mobile devices (Project page)
Tuochao Chen, Justin Chan, Shyam Gollakota
ACM SIGCOMM 2022 (ACM SIGMOBILE Research Highlights)
- Wind-dispersal of battery-free wireless devices (Project page)
Vikram Iyer, Hans Gaensbauer, Tom Daniel, Shyam Gollakota
Nature 2022
- An off-the-shelf otoacoustic-emission probe for hearing screening via a smartphone (Tune project)
Justin Chan, Nada Ali, Ali Najafi, Anna Meehan, Lisa Mancl, Emily Gallagher, Randy Bly, Shyam Gollakota
Nature Biomedical Engineering 2022
- Performing tympanometry using smartphones (Project page)
Justin Chan, Ali Najafi, Mallory Baker, Julie Kinsman, Lisa Mancl, Susan Norton, Randall Bly, Shyam Gollakota
Communications Medicine 2022
- Micro-mechanical blood clot testing using smartphones (Project page)
Justin Chan, Kelly Michaelsen, Joanne Estergreen, Daniel Sabath, Shyam Gollakota.
Nature Communications 2022
AACC Annual Scientific Meeting 2022 (Distinguished Abstract; Clinical Translational Science Division - Best Abstract Award; Hematology And Coagulation Division - Best Abstract Award)
- Testing a drop of liquid using smartphone liDAR (Project page)
Justin Chan, Ananditha Raghunath, Kelly Michaelsen, Shyam Gollakota
ACM IMWUT 2022
- Closed-loop wearable naloxone injector system
Justin Chan, Vikram Iyer, Anran Wang, Alex Lyness, Preetma Kooner, Jake Sunshine and Shyam Gollakota.
Scientific Reports 2021
- Using Smart Speakers to Contactless Monitor Heart Rhythms (Project page)
Anran Wang, Dan Nguyen, Arun Sridhar and Shyam Gollakota.
Communications Biology 2021
- Advances and Open Problems in Backscatter Networking
Vamsi Talla, Joshua Smith and Shyam Gollakota.
GetMobile 2020
- Airdropping Sensor Networks from Drones and Insects (Project page)
Vikram Iyer, Maruchi Kim, Shirley Xue, Anran Wang and Shyam Gollakota.
MobiCom 2020 
- Wireless steerable vision for live insects and insect-scale robots
Vikram Iyer, Ali Najafi, Johannes James, Sawyer Fuller and Shyam Gollakota.
Science Robotics 2020
- PACT: Privacy-Sensitive Protocols And Mechanisms
for Mobile Contact Tracing
Justin Chan, Dean Foster, Shyam Gollakota, Eric Horvitz, Joseph Jaeger, Sham Kakade, Tadayoshi Kohno, John Langford, Jonathan Larson, Puneet Sharma, Sudheesh Singanamalla, Jacob Sunshine, and Stefano Tessaro
IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 2020
- TinySDR: Low-Power SDR Platform for Over-the-Air Programmable IoT Testbeds (coverage)
Mehrdard Hessar, Ali Najafi, Vikram Iyer and Shyam Gollakota.
NSDI 2020
- Identifying Pediatric Vascular Anomalies With Deep Learning
Justin Chan, Sharat Raju, Randall Bly, Jonathan Perkins and Shyam Gollakota.
Arxiv 2019
- Contactless Infant Monitoring using White Noise
Anran Wang, Jacob Sunshine and Shyam Gollakota.
MobiCom 2019
-
Contactless cardiac arrest detection using smart devices (pdf)
Justin Chan, Thomas Rea, Shyam Gollakota and Jacob Sunshine.
npj Digital Medicine, 2019
- Detecting middle ear fluid using smartphones (pdf)
Justin Chan, Sharat Raju, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Randall Bly and Shyam Gollakota.
Science Translational Medicine, 2019
- MilliSonic: Pushing the Limits of Acoustic Motion Tracking
Anran Wang and Shyam Gollakota.
CHI 2019
- Opioid Overdose Detection Using Smartphones (pdf)
Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Shyam Gollakota and Jacob Sunshine.
Science Translational Medicine, 2019
- Living IoT: A Flying Wireless Platform on Live Insects
Vikram Iyer, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Anran Wang, Sawyer Fuller and Shyam Gollakota.
MobiCom 2019
- NetScatter: Enabling Large-Scale Backscatter Networks
Mehrdad Hessar, Ali Najafi and Shyam Gollakota.
NSDI 2019
