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 devices, 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

• Waveformer architecture to enable real-time target sound extraction
• Geekwire reports on Google acquisition of Sound Life Sciences
• TUNE project on helping create universal newborn hearing screening in Kenya (Nature Biomedical Engineering paper, Wired)
• Communications Medicine paper on middle ear disorder detection using smartphones (Stat News article)
• AAAI paper on deep learning for on-device directional hearing
• Check out our work on AI-enabled wireless clearbuds (IEEE spectrum, Techcrunch, Nvidia)
• Nature paper on computers and sensors that float in the wind like dandelion seeds
• Check out our work on wearable injector for opioid overdose reversal with West Pharma
• Contactless breathing monitoring using ultrasound on phones got FDA 510(k) clearance
• Nature Communications paper on bloot clot testing using smartphones
• Check out our work on using smart speakers to monitor irregular heart rhythm (Washington Post, Telegraph)
• Ongoing efforts with Department of Agriculture on wirelessly tracking murder hornets
• Science Robotics paper and focus article on insect-scale steerable wireless cameras (NPR, CNN, CNBC)
• NYTimes op-ed on using smart devices for COVID19 early detection
• Read our privacy-preserving protocols (PACT) for contact tracing while upholding civil liberties

Graduate Students and Mentees

• Justin Chan
• Maruchi Kim
• Bandhav Veluri
• Tuochao Chen
• Malek Itani
• Antonio Glenn

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

• Target sound extraction: Waveformer
• NeuriCam: ML for dual-camera video
• New-born hearing screening: Otoacoustic emissions
• Underwater messaging on phones: AquaApp
• Earbud source separation: Clearbuds
• Smartphone tympanometer: Middle ear detection
• Dandelion floating sensors: Wind dispersal sensors
• Directional hearing: Hybridbeam
• Blood clot testing: Coagulation Phone
• Airdropping wireless sensors: Sensor Drop
• Low-power steerable wireless camera: Beetlecam
• Bluetooth and GPS based COVID19 exposure assist: CovidSafe → WA notify
• Low-Power SDR platform: TinySDR
• Millimeter-level acoustic tracking: Millisonic
• RF gesture recognition: AllSee
• Active sonar on smartphones and speakers: Sound Life Sciences → Google
• Ear Infection detection on smartphones: Wavely Diagnostics
• Sleep apnea diagnosis on phones: ResMed & Sleepscore
• Ambient backscatter communication: Jeeva Wireless

Recent Publications (full list)

• 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
  IEEE ICASSP 2023
  
  
• Wireless earbuds for low-cost hearing screening
  Justin Chan, Antonio Glenn, Malek Itani, Lisa Mancl, Emily Gallagher, Randy Bly, Shwetak Patel, Shyam Gollakota
  ACM MobiSys 2023
  
  
• 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
  
  
• Wind-dispersal of battery-free wireless devices (Project page)
  Vikram Iyer, Hans Gaensbauer, Tom Daniel, Shyam Gollakota
  Nature 2022
  
  
• Underwater messaging using mobile devices (Project page)
  Tuochao Chen, Justin Chan, Shyam Gollakota
  ACM SIGCOMM 2022 (ACM SIGMOBILE Research Highlights)
  
  
• 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
  
  
• Testing a drop of liquid using smartphone liDAR (Project page)
  Justin Chan, Ananditha Raghunath, Kelly Michaelsen, Shyam Gollakota
  ACM IMWUT 2022