Dinesh Bharadia

UC San Diego | Electrical and Computer Engineering | CSE affiliate

Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Affiliate Faculty, Computer Science and Engineering

Franklin Antonio Hall 2303, UC San Diego

Office hours: Monday 2 pm to 3 pm except holidays, otherwise by appointment

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.

Our broad impact areas are vision and perception systems, sensing systems, wireless communications, computing systems, and wireless networking. WCSNG has curated and created open-source datasets and tools that enable reproducible research and lower the barrier to entry in communication, computing, and sensing.

Research areas Publications Datasets & tools

Openings

Apply to WCSNG Group

If you are an exceptional student, researcher, or postdoc interested in working with WCSNG, email dineshb at ucsd dot edu and review the current group openings.

For the latest PhD and internship opportunities, application instructions, and forms, use the WCSNG Join Us page so the year-specific details stay current.

If you do not hear back within about 2 days, send a follow-up.

If you still do not hear back, follow up again a few days later.

I usually process email in morning and evening batches.

Current openings and forms

WCSNG

Projects, impact areas, and current directions.

WCSNG consists of highly interdisciplinary engineers spanning electrical engineering, computer science, data science, sensing, circuits, computer vision, machine learning, and AI.

We develop science and algorithms alongside real-world implementations and prototypes, moving from fundamental ideas to deployable systems and shared research infrastructure.

Key research areas

Wireless Sensing and Localization NextG Wireless Systems Battery-Free IoT and Smart Surfaces Spectrum Intelligence Autonomous Perception and Radar Wireless Security and Privacy
Visit WCSNG Meet the team Open source projects Join the group

Research

Systems research shaped by real deployment constraints.

The research program spans perception systems, sensing systems, wireless communications, computing systems, and wireless networking, with projects that move from theory to deployable prototypes, curated datasets, and open tools.

Wireless sensing setup from the WCSNG group

Wireless Sensing and Localization

Turn commodity WiFi, BLE, and UWB infrastructure into centimeter-scale sensing systems for indoor localization, robotics, SLAM, and secure spatial intelligence.
Next-generation wireless experiment from the WCSNG group

NextG Wireless Systems

Build the next generation of wireless systems around reliable mmWave links, sustainable MIMO, and real-time AI control inside programmable RANs.
Battery-free backscatter hardware from the WCSNG group

Battery-Free IoT and Smart Surfaces

Push backscatter and smart-surface design toward ultra-low-power connectivity, battery-free sensing, and wireless environments that can actively shape propagation.
Spectrum sensing visualization from the WCSNG group

Spectrum Intelligence

Sense wide swaths of spectrum in real time, compress what matters, and build the data pipelines needed for spectrum-aware wireless systems.

View all research areas

Publications

Recent papers and systems contributions.

Selected work across wireless communication, sensing, localization, perception, and robust networked systems. The full archive includes papers, project pages, and software links.

See the full publications archive

Bio

Short professional background

I have been at UC San Diego since January 2018. My group works across computer vision, deep learning, wireless communication, sensing, and networking, building technologies from theory to practice for robotics, autonomous systems, and everyday devices.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL, focusing on data-center networking and wireless sensing. I received my PhD at Stanford University for work on full-duplex radios, which were long considered near-impossible to realize in practice.

Before Stanford, I received my bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 2010, where I received the gold medal for graduating at the top of the Electrical Engineering class.

Impact

Broader industry impact

Our research on full-duplex radios translated into Kumu Networks, where I worked as Principal Scientist for nearly two years to commercialize the technology and bring it into real networks. The resulting systems completed field trials with major tier-1 providers including Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom, helping show that full-duplex could move from research to deployable products.

Teaching

Hands-on systems courses with a strong theory core.

My teaching centers on challenging assumptions, building strong intuition, and pairing theory with direct exposure to systems, hardware, and applied experimentation.

Current course

ECE 157A

Wireless communications laboratory built around SDRs, labs, mini-projects, and digital communication systems.

View ECE 157A course page

Graduate

ECE 257B

Principles of Wireless Communication, focused on foundations and system design tradeoffs.

View ECE 257B course page

Laboratory

ECE 157B

Wireless communication and wireless sensing laboratories built around practical experimentation.

View ECE 157B course page

Laboratory archive

ECE 157B

Wireless sensing laboratory material spanning respiration, FMCW, localization, and practical experimentation.

View ECE 157B archive page

Read more about teaching