I am Associate Professor in the ECE department with an affiliate appointment with the CSE department at UC San Diego. Our group WCSNG designs systems for Wireless Communication, Computing, Sensing, and Networking at UC San Diego.
The vision for our research is to design and prototype performant systems for communicating, sensing, computing, and securing information in our connected world, solving real-world problems. Our research has aimed to solve fundamental questions, which has often led to new areas of research and commercialization.
WCSNG group consists of highly interdisciplinary engineers, spanning electrical engineers, data scientists, computer scientists, and mechanical engineers, and works at the intersection of computing, signal processing, circuits, computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We develop science and algorithms and their real-world implementation and prototypes in our impact areas.
Our broad impact areas are vision/perception systems, sensing systems, wireless communications, computing systems, and wireless networking. WCSNG group has curated and created various open-source datasets and tools that enable reproducible research and eases barriers to entry for researchers in computing, communication, and sensing.
Apply to WCSNG Group
If you are an exceptional student, researcher or postdoc and interested in working with the group, drop me an email (dineshb at ucsd dot edu) and/or reach out to the existing PhD students or postdocs.
I have multiple openings for the Fall 2023 Ph.D. program. I won’t promise that I will respond to your email. But you can choose to email me with your resume and specific interest in the lab.
For Ph.D. applications, apply to the ECE Ph.D. program and CSE Ph.D. program (our application process allows the application to both ECE and CSE without additional fees). For the ECE Ph.D. program, choose communication theory and systems, and for the CSE Ph.D. program choose systems and networking and mention my name for both your application.
Office hours
Atkinson Hall 4308, 9500 Gilman Dr., UC San Diego
Mondays 3 pm to 4 pm or by Appointment
Projects
- Sensing and Localization using wireless and sound signals for robotics, everyday devices, users and many-more applications.
- Indoor Localization: Developing privacy preserving self-localization for users, user devices, robots and even smart sound devices.
- Publications: BLoc – CoNExT’18, Wideo – NSDI’15, SSLIDE – ICCASP’21, SpotFi – Sigcomm’15.
- Low-power and Low Latency Localization – Next generation Localization would enable safety for Industrial IoT 4.0 with Smart Manufacturing, Warehouse and Private 5G.
- Publications: ULoc – Ubicomp’21, BLoc – CoNExt’18.
- Deployable Wireless Localization: Wireless Localization, specifically WiFi/BLE leveraging existing infrastructure has been studied for two decades without any deployments. We have developed autonomous robots that enable simultaneous mapping of environment and infrastructure and deep-learning powered localization systems, enabling easy to deploy location services.
- Publications: LocAP-NSDI’20, DLoc-Mobicom’20, SpotFi-Sigcomm’15 and BLoc-CoNEXT’18.
- Indoor Localization: Developing privacy preserving self-localization for users, user devices, robots and even smart sound devices.
- Communication and power delivery for IoT and everyday devices
- Ultra-Low power WiFi communication for IoTs: Enabling IoT devices to communicate with existing WiFi/BLE infrastructure at >1000x lower power.
- Publications: [ISSCC’22], [SyncScatter-NSDI’21], [ISSCC’21] and [ISSCC’20], [JSSC’20], BackFi-Sigcomm’15, HitchHike-Sensys’16, FreeRider-CoNext’17.
- Wireless Power Transfer: On the other hand, we are developing solutions to provide wireless power of milli-watts of power sufficient to power-up WiFi and BLE directly.
- Publication: Capttery-Mobisys’19
- Ultra-Low power WiFi communication for IoTs: Enabling IoT devices to communicate with existing WiFi/BLE infrastructure at >1000x lower power.
- Extending the Sensing abilities of Wireless
- Force Sensing:
- Securing our physical spaces: With ever evolving mini-drones and delivery drones, it is eminent to learn of devices in our environment and vice-versa for the Amazon’s of the world to perform remote secure delivery.
- Publications: Drone-scale Sensys’20
- Spectrum Sensing and Wireless sensing driven communication:
- Sweep-Sensing 5 GHz in a milli-second: Sensing the entire spectrum with high-resolution and dynamic range in time, frequency and space (wide-area) in cost efficient is need of the day and near-impossible. Such sensing would enable highly efficient communication, securing our communications and preserving our privacy.
- Publications:SweepSense-NSDI’19 and [GetMobile’20]
- Shipping the sensed spectrum data: Accurate spectrum sensing with just a single sensor generates 800 Mbps, which cannot be shipped in real-time. Enabling >1000x compression and shipping only necessary information.
- Publications: SparSDR-Mobisys’19
- Application of sensing – privacy attacks: All our user devices has bluetooth enabling advertisement, proximity and continuity protocols. Our work shows this comes at the expense of users privacy, requires hardware re-design.
- Publications: BLE-Attack – IEEE Security and Privacy’22
- Sweep-Sensing 5 GHz in a milli-second: Sensing the entire spectrum with high-resolution and dynamic range in time, frequency and space (wide-area) in cost efficient is need of the day and near-impossible. Such sensing would enable highly efficient communication, securing our communications and preserving our privacy.
- Autonomous Sensing and Perception:
- Perception in bad-weather: Radar based Pointilism-Sensys’20
- Enabling Cameras to perceive the depth: S3Net-ECCV’20, SigNet-CVPR’19
- Reliable xG communications: mm-wave and beyond
- Traditional mm-wave connectivity is unreliable at best (providing connectivity .5\% of times), due to directional nature of these links. Our work attempts to invalidate this premise, by creating multi-beam, providing both high throughput and reliability.
- mmreliable , mmobile
- Indoor mm-wave connectivity in indoor suffers from unrealible communications. We developed relaying based un-thered indoor connectivity showing AR and VR usecase.
- Publications: HotNets’16, MoVR-NSDI’17
- Traditional mm-wave connectivity is unreliable at best (providing connectivity .5\% of times), due to directional nature of these links. Our work attempts to invalidate this premise, by creating multi-beam, providing both high throughput and reliability.
- Communication and Sensing with Smart Surfaces:
- Smart Surfaces: ScatterMIMO - Mobicom’20
- Radio- Interferometry:
- Full Duplex radios: Sigcomm’13, NSDI’14, Sigcomm’14, Sigcomm’15, Sigcomm’16
A more detailed list of projects and on-going research can be found at WCSNG publications.
Selected Awards & Honors
- Forbes 30 under 30 Science Category World-wide: Forbes recognizes 30 young scientists and engineers anywhere in the world under the age of 30, who have made outstanding contributions to science and technology.
- Marconi Young Scholar Award: Marconi Society recognizes outstanding young scientists and engineers anywhere in the world.
- MIT TR35 Award: World’s Top 35 Innovators Under the Age of 35. Technology Review describes, ``His radio could be a godsend for telecom companies and consumers.’’
- Michael Dukakis Leadership Award: Recognizes outstanding young leaders in CyberSecurity.
- Awarded Sarah and Thomas Kailath Stanford Graduate Fellowship to pursue MS-PhD in the field of Electrical Engineering
- Awarded Best Student in Electrical Engineering at IIT Kanpur by Prime Minister of India
News
- Dec 2020: Two papers on backscatter communication and backscatter Force semsing got accepted at NSDI’21. Congrats Manideep and Agrim!
- Sept 2020: Another backscatter paper in circuits conference ISSCC’21. Congrats Manideep and team!
- Sept 2020: Two papers got accepted at Sensys’20. Congrats Kshitiz and Yeswanth!
- Sept 2020: IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits (JSSC) accepted: A Low-Power Backscatter Modulation System Communicating Across Tens of Meters with Standards-Compliant Wi-Fi Transceivers. Congrats Mani, Chi and team!
- July 2020: mmNets workshop (Mobicom’20) paper accepted mMobile- Building a mmWave testbed to evaluate and address mobility effects. Congrats Ish and team!
- June 2020: ECCV’20 paper got accepted on S3Net- Semantic-Aware Self-Supervised Depth Estimation with Monocular Videos and Synthetic Data. Congrats Inderjot and team!
- June 2020: WCSNG is opensourcing largest available, real-world indoor Location labelled WiFi CSI dataset, WILD for non-profit research purposes.
- June 2020: BluBLE, our Covid-19 app is in news here.
- June 2020: ScatterMIMO- our smart reflecting surface that can double the WiFi throughput is in UCSD news and Hackster.io
- Apr 2020: WCSNG developed BluBLE, a smartphone app that provides personal risk indicator with Covid-19. It monitors the surrounding using Bluetooth signal while preserving privacy. In news at Techxplore. … See all News
Selected Press and Media Coverage
- Marconi Young Scholar Award was covered by numerous news outlets detailed by Anand Parthasarathy, NDTV, Times of India, Stanford News, so on
- MIT TR35 Award was covered by Press release, CSAIL News, MIT TR35 Talk, India New England , Skill Outlook,India Eagle, so on
- HitchHike (IoT Connectivity) was covered by Stanford News, ACM TechNews, ECN, Science Blog, Pace Today, North Dallas Gazette, New Electronics, RFID Journal, NFC World
- Full-duplex radio was covered by Wall Street Journal, CNBC, MIT Tech. Review, TechCrunch, Fierce Wireless
- Wireless Virtual Reality was covered by MIT news, WIRED, Firstpost , TechCrunch, circuit breaker, University Herald, Digital Trends
- SpotFi: Indoor Localization was covered by MIT Tech. Review
Short Bio
I have been at UC San Diego as a faculty since January 2018. My group has diverse focus from computer vision, deep learning to wireless communication, sensing and networking. We build from theory to practice technologies which have impact on robotics, autonomous systems and day-to-day life.
Previously, I worked as postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL, focusing on data-center networking and wireless sensing. I received my Ph.D. at Stanford University for my work on full-duplex radios, which were considered near impossible to build, basically enabling radios to transmit and receive simultaneously on the same frequency. From 2013 to 2015, I took a leave of absence from my Ph.D. to commercialize research on the practical full-duplex radio at Kumu Networks, which underwent successful field trials with tier 1 network providers worldwide – Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom and is now being commercially deployed.
Before joining Stanford, I received my bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2010. I was awarded a gold medal at IIT Kanpur for graduating at the top of the class of 2010 in Electrical Engineering.
Broader Industry Impact
- Full Duplex Our research on full-duplex radios has translated into a commercial venture Kumu Networks. I worked as a Principal Scientist at Kumu Networks for nearly two years to commercialize this research and bring it to the rest of the world.
At Kumu Networks, I led the technology (both architecture and algorithm design) for in-band full duplex radios to build a commercial product. The product completed successful field trials with major Tier 1 network providers – Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom and is now being commercially deployed. To this date, it is the only successful commercial demonstration of full duplex radios.
Due to its proven commercial viability and promise, full duplex is now actively being designed into next-generation wireless standards. Both 5G cellular and next-generation WiFi standards are incorporating full duplex or self-interference cancellation technology in various forms.