I am an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore.
I lead the Wireless, Embedded Intelligence, Sensing, and Emerging Technologies
(WEISER)—a small, talented team of engineers focused on embedded
systems. We engineer systems at the intersection of electronics, communication,
computer science, and machine intelligence. Our approach is bottom‑up:
we enjoy designing systems from scratch. Our efforts include the
development of radio transmitters and receivers,
tiny language models, sensors, and
operating systems
(microwatt computers, 200k+ LoC).
Our research has been recognised with several awards, including the ACM
Student Research Competition (twice!) at MobiCom, flagship awards from
industry (such as ABB and Google), and numerous other publication and
demonstration awards.
May 2026: Two papers from our group accepted for 2026
venues — M² Oscillator (Featured Paper, ACM MobiSys 2026,
Cambridge, UK; with Prof. Prabal Dutta, UC Berkeley) and HILO
(IEEE RFID 2026, Santa Fe, NM).
April 2026:Pramuka has been selected as a
Rising Star at the Rising Stars Forum, ACM MobiSys 2026.
October 2025:Dhairya presented
AudioCast — our
work conceptualising Beyond-Backscatter Transmitters through
low-power audio-broadcasting tags on unused FM-broadcast spectrum —
at ACM UbiComp 2025
in Espoo, Finland.
The system was also shown as a live demonstration at the conference.
Watch a short
video teaser
presented at the conference.
The work is featured in an
NUS article
on how AudioCast delivers ultra-low-power wireless communication at scale.
June 2025: Our group had a strong presence at ACM MobiSys 2025.
Pramuka presented SoMIX, a novel architecture for low-power receivers that
achieves long-range communication while maintaining extremely low power
consumption. This work is a collaboration between NUS, Uppsala University
(with Dr. Wenqing Yan), and UC Berkeley (with Prof. Prabal Dutta).
You can read more about the paper [PDF].
Rajashekar was selected as one of the Rising Stars and presented his work
on the design of Beyond-Backscatter systems, which address key limitations
that have hindered the widespread adoption of backscatter systems.
Rajashekar demonstrated
AudioCast
(done with Dhairya Shah) during the demonstrations session.
May 2025:Dhairya
heads off to Cambridge for a summer internship at Nokia Bell Labs.
May 2024:Rajashekar Reddy
heads off to Cambridge for an internship at Nokia Bell Labs.
May 2024: Nobel Ang received the Best Undergraduate
Project award (SoC Innovation Prize 2024) for his project titled
“Connecting IoT Devices to Edge and Cloud Systems,” conducted in our
research group.
May 2024: We received the
Best Demonstration (Runner-up) Award
at ACM/IEEE IPSN 2024 (co-located with CPSWeek) for
PixelGen.
This work was presented by an undergraduate (Kunjun Li) from National University
of Singapore.
April 2024: I received the Google Research Scholar Award
for our work on designing battery-free trackers (similar to AirTags). I am the
only faculty outside North America in the
Systems and Networking category
this year.
January 2024:Wenqing Yan,
a student whom I co-supervised
with Prof. Christian Rohner, successfully defended her dissertation titled
Design and Identification of Wireless Transmitters for a Low-power and Secure Internet of Things.
The opponent for the defence was Prof. Haitham Hassanieh (EPFL); the committee
included Prof. Niki Trigoni (University of Oxford), Prof. Danny Hughes (KU Leuven),
and Prof. Mikael Stenard (Uppsala University).
Defence video here.
June 2023: We received the
Best Demonstration Award
at ACM MobiSys 2023 for demonstrating a platform designed to teach the
fundamentals of wireless communication using the backscatter mechanism.
This platform was jointly developed with my PhD student Wenqing Yan,
Prof. Christian Rohner, and Tobias Mages from Uppsala University, Sweden.
2023: Mentees won the ACM MobiCom Student Research
Competition — Moteen Shah and Adithya Bijoy (Winner, Undergraduate);
Steven Waskito (Third Place, Undergraduate).
March 2022: I am serving as a Jury member for selecting
the
2022 ABB Research Award in Honour of Hubertus von Grünberg.
Other members of the selection jury include: Dr. Hubertus von Grünberg,
former chair of the ABB Board of Directors; Prof. Nina Thornhill, Imperial
College London; Prof. Roland Siegwart, ETH Zurich; Prof. Manfred Morari,
University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. Bernhard Eschermann, CTO of ABB Process
Automation.
March 2022: I’ve begun a new chapter in my journey
as an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. I am
bootstrapping the WEISER Research Group (Wireless, Embedded Intelligence,
Sensing, and Emerging Technologies).
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 has been
covered by several media outlets including Hackster, El Mundo (the largest
newspaper in Spain), Stacey on IoT, TechXplore, AzoSensors, and 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.
2021: Wenqing Yan received the
N²Women Young Researcher Fellowship.
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.
2020: Wenqing Yan received the
Best Ph.D. Forum Award at ACM SenSys.
December 2019: Uppsala
University Innovation recognised our battery-free sensing work with the
Attractive Innovation Award and selected it among the top 15 projects from the
University!
Find the press release here.
November 2019: For my doctoral
dissertation and ongoing research on enabling large-scale data collection in
industrial settings using battery-free sensors, I was awarded the ABB Research
Award in 2019 in Honour of Hubertus von Grünberg. This award includes an
endowment of USD 300,000, the highest granted by any company in its category.
Read more from the
ABB press release
and the
Uppsala University press release.
2018: We received the Best
Demonstration Award at ACM WiSec.
2018: Awarded the Breakthrough
Ideas Grant from the Swedish Innovation Agency (Vinnova) as sole PI.
2017: Andreas Soleiman won the
ACM MobiCom Student Research Competition (Graduate category).
Service
Technical Program Committees
2026: SENSYS, MOBISYS, MOBICOM, ENSSYS
2025: SENSYS, ENSSYS, IMC, INFOCOM
2024: IMC, SENSYS, EWSN, ENSSYS, INFOCOM
2023: SENSYS, INFOCOM, IoTDI
2022: INFOCOM
2021: ICDCS, INFOCOM
2019: ICDCS, IoTDI
Conference Organization
Special Session Co-Chair (with Prof. Gregory Durgin),
Beyond Conventional Backscatter, IEEE RFID 2026
Anna Seiderer (Uppsala University, 2025–2030;
co-supervised with Prof. Christian Rohner)
Former
Dr. Wenqing Yan
(Uppsala University, 2018–2024;
co-supervised with Prof. Christian Rohner and Prof. Thiemo Voigt).
Now Experienced Researcher at Ericsson Research, Sweden.
Beyond doctoral mentorship, I greatly enjoy working with master’s
students, undergraduates, and visiting interns.
See the full list of students I have worked with.
Teaching
I teach graduate and undergraduate level courses related to wireless networking
and embedded systems.
Research
We enjoy building systems. This involves embedded platform design, programming,
networking, and real-world deployments. The required skill set ranges from chip
fabrication and programming microcontrollers to developing networking and wireless
protocols, distributed computing concepts, machine learning frameworks, and
prototyping applications for various scenarios. Our work is interdisciplinary,
and we welcome students from diverse backgrounds (EE, ECE, CSE, Physics, etc.).
Industry impact:
Cited as foundational prior art by 15+ patents from industry and academic
leaders including Nokia, Vivo Mobile,
KAIST, and Oppo.
Sovereign’s principle:
As a matter of principle regarding research conducted at public
institutions, I made the conscious decision not to prosecute this patent
further, choosing instead to offer the foundational work to the community.
Overturning the notion that backscatter is a short-range mechanism.
Towards Wide-area Backscatter Networks
Ambuj Varshney, Carlos Pérez-Penichet, Christian Rohner, and Thiemo Voigt
ACM HotWireless (co-located with MobiCom), 2017
Bulk-forwarding through a custom-designed testbed with electronically steerable directional antennas.
Education
I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences (EECS), University of California, Berkeley.
Prior to that, I completed my doctoral studies with a dissertation titled
Enabling Sustainable Networked Embedded Systems
at Uppsala University in Sweden. Before that, I was
a Software Engineer at NXP Semiconductors, and earlier graduated with a
Bachelor’s in Information and Communication Technology.
My doctoral dissertation was awarded the
2019 ABB Research Award in Honour of Hubertus von Grünberg.
This award included an endowment worth USD 300,000 — the highest of its kind
for early-career researchers by a commercial organisation. The endowment was hosted
at the Department of EECS, University of California, Berkeley.
A video from ABB highlighting some of our research.
Funding
My research has been funded by government agencies (Swedish Innovation Agency,
Vetenskapsrådet [Sweden], Ministry of Education [Singapore]), university
sources (ODPRT, ARTIC), and unrestricted gifts or grants from industry (NCS,
Google, ABB).
Commitment to Open Source
I believe that academic research—especially when supported by public
funding and unrestricted industry gifts—should serve the broader
community. The default state for systems research should be the public
domain. We engineer systems from scratch and open-source our codebase
under permissive licenses (like Apache 2.0) so others can build upon our
work freely. We file patents only when structurally necessary or
unavoidable. As an example, we filed a foundational International Patent
Application (PCT/SE2020/050821) on beyond-backscatter transmitters, but
deliberately chose not to prosecute it to the national phase. This ensures
the technology remains open for the community to use and build upon.
