Ambuj Varshney
ambujv at nus dot edu dot sg

I am an engineer and an experimental computer scientist. I like to build real systems. I enjoy working at the intersection of electronics, computer science, and communication. More formally, I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore . I am bootstrapping, Wireless, Embedded Intelligence, Sensing and Emerging Technologies (WEISER) group. I am part of the Systems and Networking area at School of Computing at National University of Singapore.

One of our major ongoing projects is to rethink factories of the future by enabling massive data collections, significantly increase the productivity, and usher in the next industrial revolution. This project is being conducted together with UC Berkeley (Prof. Prabal Dutta) and ABB. Our approach involves creating sticker form factor, and low power consumption sensors. There is even a possibility of powering these small computers with only the energy harvested from the environment, thus operating without batteries. You can read more about this project here.

A grant from the 2019 ABB Research Award supported my postdoctoral studies at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley.

I spent several wonderful years at Uppsala, Sweden, where I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Uppsala University . It is among the world's oldest institutions (est. 1477!), and oldest in Scandinavia.

I worked as a software engineer at NXP Semiconductor. I was responsible to design low-power wireless networking stack. Finally, I obtained a Bachelors in Information and Communication Technology from DA-IICT, India and I mostly worked under mentorship of Prof. Prabhat Ranjan.

I am a Swedish citizen 🇸🇪, and an Overseas Citizen of India 🇮🇳

I am actively looking for motivated Ph.D students, as well as undergraduates and visiting researchers.

• [April 2022] I am serving as a session chair in IEEE INFOCOM 2022 (Conference) and CPS-IotBench 2022 (Part of CPS-IoT Week 2022 with ACM/IEEE IPSN 2022).
• [March 2022] Our joint work with Wenqing Yan (Uppsala University) and Prof. Prabal Dutta (University of California, Berkeley) was accepted at ACM MobiSys 2022.
• [March 2022] I am delighted to have returned to Asia (after almost ten years!). I am now an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science@School of Computing , National University of Singapore
• [January 2022] I am honoured to serve on the jury of the ABB Research Award in Honor of Hubertus von Grünberg in 2022 . Its research endowment (approximately 300k USD) is one of the highest offered by any commercial organization. You should consider applying for this prestigious grant if you are finishing your PhD studies, or have just recently completed your studies.
• [November 2021] We will be presenting our work(done in collaboration with IMDEA Networks, Madrid, Spain ) at ACM MobiCom 2021 . We show that it is possible to wirelessly transmit to distances of hundreds of meters while using few microwatts of power. We achieve this by designing a hybrid light and RF backscatter system. The work is available here . It has also been covered by several media outlets: Hackster , El Mundo (Largest newspaper in Spain) , Stacey on IoT , TechXplore , AzoSensors, ElectronicsForu
• [September 2021] I am a University of California, Berkeley - Form+Fund Fellow for 2021. I have been selected for a highly selective and prestigious fellowship for the Spring 2021 cohort.
• [April 2021] I am excited to serve on the editoral board of the "Wireless Embedded Systems" track of the exciting new open-access journal Journal of Systems Research"
• [August 2020] Looking forward to beginning a new chapter in my career as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of Prof. Prabal Dutta.
• [June 2020] Extremely proud that Andreas Soleiman whom I have been mentoring for past several years has received Ph.D. admits from University of California@Berkeley, MIT (accepted), University of Washington@Seattle, Dartmouth and others!!
• [December 2019] Uppsala University Innovation appreciated our battery-free sensing work with Attractive Innovation Award and selected it among Top 15 projects from the University! Find the press release here
• [November 2019] For my doctoral dissertation and ongoing work to enable large-scale data collection in industries with battery-free sensors, I received the prestigious ABB Research Award 2019. The award includes the highest endowment contribution from any company, valued at 300,000 USD. You can read more about this from the following press release from ABB, and another press release from Uppsala University.

• Rapid Growth in the Internet of Things is Threatened due to the Energy Challenge

I take great pride in mentoring students. I have been fortunate to mentor following students (formally):

• Andreas Soleiman (2016-2019) [RA, Master thesis] → MIT EECS PhD (withdrew to stay in industry)
• Elena di Lascio (2015-2016) [Master thesis] → USI PhD (completed) → Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR)
• Oliver Harms (2016-2017)[Master thesis] → Chalmers PhD
• Gustav Eriksson (2018)[Masters Thesis] → Project Engineer
• Sam Hylamia (2017-2018)[Masters Thesis and Research Assistant] → Uppsala University PhD
• Simon Olofsson (2015)[Project assistant] → Imperial College London PhD → Facebook/Meta

I have also been very fortunate to collaborate with the following students:

• Lorenzo Corneo (Uppsala University) → Aalto University → Ericsson Research
• Wenqing Yan (Uppsala University)
• Ander Galisteo (UC3M/IMDEA Networks) → DoJo Five
• Bo Wei (UNSW/now at Lancaster University) → Lancaster University (Lecturer)
• Muhammad Sarmad (IMDEA Networks)