Welcome
I am a faculty member in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. My research interests are at the intersection of Systems and Networking and Embedded Systems, and I am particularly excited about research problems that benefit from using hardware insights to build more scalable and energy efficient systems.
I am the Founder and the Director of the Systems Networking and Energy Efficiency - SYNERGY Labs. From 2010-2013 I served as the Executive Director of the NSF Expeditions in Variability. At UCSD I was a member of the Microelectronic Embedded Systems Lab (MESL) and the Systems and Networking Group (SysNet).
Working with me
AY 2022/2023 Update: I am always looking for good students to join our SYNERGYLAB at CMU. We have several projects in the Internet of Things and the Mobile
Computing space, particularly looking at privacy and security challenges. We also have a long-running project on EduSense,
where we are building the classroom sensing fabric for the future of smart campuses classrooms! We also have a longer
running project to build the software stack for IoT and Smart Buildings, and various 'apps' on top of it. The Publications link at the top of the page provide an overview of the current research directions of
our lab. If you are awesome and are motivated to work on really exciting and socially relevant projects at the
intersection of hardware and software systems, while maintaining security and privacy contact me by email.
PhD Applicants: If you are a PhD applicant there are multiple programs at CMU that you can apply to and work with me. Many of my current students are a part of the Societal Computing PhD Program which I strongly encourage you to look at. I also advise students admitted to the ECE and the CSD PhD programs. If you want to work with me, send me an email *after* you have applied to these PhD programs. You can mention that you would like to work with me in the application and your research statement if you like the style of work my students and I do.
An Important Note: Admission decisions at CMU, and many other top PhD programs, are done by a separate admission committee. Individual faculty members have no say into who is admitted to the program and are only involved (if at all) once the admission committee bar is met or even when the students come to visit. As such, emailing me your CV and material and asking me whether you have a chance is not going to help *at all* since most faculty members won't respond since we simply cannot answer that question. :-)
Students @ CMU If you are a PhD / MS / Undergrad student already at CMU, please email to set up a time or drop by my office.
PhD Applicants: If you are a PhD applicant there are multiple programs at CMU that you can apply to and work with me. Many of my current students are a part of the Societal Computing PhD Program which I strongly encourage you to look at. I also advise students admitted to the ECE and the CSD PhD programs. If you want to work with me, send me an email *after* you have applied to these PhD programs. You can mention that you would like to work with me in the application and your research statement if you like the style of work my students and I do.
An Important Note: Admission decisions at CMU, and many other top PhD programs, are done by a separate admission committee. Individual faculty members have no say into who is admitted to the program and are only involved (if at all) once the admission committee bar is met or even when the students come to visit. As such, emailing me your CV and material and asking me whether you have a chance is not going to help *at all* since most faculty members won't respond since we simply cannot answer that question. :-)
Students @ CMU If you are a PhD / MS / Undergrad student already at CMU, please email to set up a time or drop by my office.
What's New
11/2022
I was covered on Nov 22nd on the National Public Radio (NPR) Radio show called "Tech Tuesday by Ann Fisher". Ann interviwed me about our IoT Security and Privacy label research for consumers. [Direct Link, 1min - 19min]
10/2022
I was interviewed by a number of news outlets after the IoT labeling summit! Super exciting to share our work on the project. Interviewed by and some followup Articles:
[CMU/CyLab]
[WhiteHouse Release]
[Cyberscoop]
[Inside Cybersecurity]
[Axios]
[Stacey on IoT]
[Fierce Electronics]
[Ars Technica]
[Politico] [Wall Street Journal]
10/2022
I presented our IoT Labels work at the IoT labeling summit organized by the White House! Incredibly grateful to be invited to the event and to present a briefing on our 4 year-long journey on designing an IoT Security and Privacy label !
09/2022
Paper on consumers willingness to pay for secure and private IoT devices is accepted to USENIX Security '23! Congrats Pardis!
06/2022
Our lab has been working on BuildingDepot, our Building "OS", for close to 8 years! Many people have contributed to it over the years -- THANK YOU! While it was always open source with periodic point releases, the GitHub Repo is now public!
06/2022
Congratulations to Haojian Jin on his faculty job search! Haojian will join UCSD/HDSI as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2022!
06/2022
Congratulations to Pardis Emami-Naeni on her faculty job search! Pardis will join Duke CS as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2022!
04/2022
Honored to serve on the ACM BuildSys 2022 TPC! Submit your best work by July 15th, 2022!
03/2022
Congrats Tianshi and Kayla for winning a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at CHI'22!
03/2022
Paper on Ephemeral Ownership of IoT Devices (TEO) is conditionally accepted to MobiSys 2022! Congrats Han!
03/2022
Paper on Pekaboo, a new programming framework for private IoT apps is accepted to Oakland S&P 2022! Congrats Haojian!
02/2022
Paper on iOS Privacy Nutrition Labels uptake accepted to CHI 2022! Congrats
Yucheng, Deyuan, Tianshi!
02/2022
Paper on Privacy Protective Behaviors in Smart Homes accepted to CHI 2022!
Congrats Haojian, Boyuan, Rituparna, Yaxing!
01/2022
Paper on Protecting Smart Homes from Unintended Actions has been accepted to ICCPS 2022! Congrats Aqsa!
1/2022
Brick Consortium Members announcement makes the news!
[HVAC Informed] .
[Canadian Consulting Engineer] .
[Commercial Construction and Renovation] .
[ACH&R News]
1/2022
Brick Consortium Announces Inaugural Commercial Members: Johnson Controls,
Schneider Electric, Mapped, Clockwork Analytics and Carrier! Really proud of the work the core members of our
consortium have done over the past several years on Brick!
12/2021
Honored to serve on the ACM MobiSys 2022 TPC! Submit your best work by Dec 20th, 2022!
12/2021
Overview paper on our journey of designing a security and privacy "nutrition label" for IoT devices is accepted to IEEE S&P Magazine ! Congrats Pardis and Janarth.
11/2021
Paper on understanding the challenges developers face when creating accurate privacy nutrition lables is accepted to ACM CHI 2022! Congratulations Tianshi and Kayla!
9/2021
Paper on Marble, on Collaborative Scheduling of Batteryless Sensors with Meta Reinforcement Learning, is accepted to ACM BuildSys 2021 ! Congratulations Francesco, Bharath and Dezhi!
9/2021
Bharathan Balaji (Now at Amazon) wrote a nice article on some of our early work on sensing, control and ML in smart Buildings. Keep up the good work Bharath! [Amazon Science Blog
Post].
8/2021
Tianshi Li wins one of the CyLab
Presidential Fellowships! Congratulations Tianshi!
7/2021
Our paper on creating a tool `Honeysuckle' for Annotation-Guided Code Generation of In-App Privacy Notices is accepted
Ubicomp (IMWUT) 2021.
Congratulations Tianshi!
6/2021
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) drafted a
White Paper exploring mechanisms to establish confidence in IoT device security and proposed IoT labels as a
potential method. Our
response to their RFC and our
IoT Label Design .
6/2021
Our paper stuying the factors that make people install a COVID-19 contact tracing app has been accepted to
Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC) 2021.
Congratulations Tianshi, Camille, Sagar, Jackie!
5/2021
Our paper on Capture: Centralized Library Management for Heterogeneous IoT Devices has been accepted to
USENIX Security 2021. Congratulations Han and Abhijith!
4/2021
Our paper on Smart Traffic Lights Optimization was accepted to the
2021 IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things.
Congratulations Prasoon!
3/2021
Now that the Brick Schema consortium has been formed, the momentum continues. Erik Paulson (JCI) has written a great post
on Medium
comparing BRICK with Haystack.. Similarly, BRICK is covered on another blog: Stacey on IoT . Check it
out!
2/2021
Our paper studying the attributes on a IoT Security privacy label that affect consumers risk perception and their
willingness to purchase has been accepted to Oakland
(S&P) 2021. Congratulations Pardis and Janarth!
1/2021
MLIoT, our ML System for closely coupled training and serving tasks for IoT Settings is accepted to
IoTDI 2021. Congratulations Sudershan, Anurag and Prahal!
1/2021
Congratulations Aqsa Kashaf on winning the IETF Applied Networking Research Prize for
2021 for our IMC 2020 work on charactering the 3rd party dependencies on the Web!
12/2020
ClassGaze paper accepted to ACM CHI 2021 ! ClassGaze cpntinues to build on
our EduSense classroom sensing infrastructure, providing a preview of the classroom
digital-twin idea our team is working on. Congrats Karan, Deval and the whole team.
12/2020
The Wall Street Journal covers our IoT Privacy and Security Label work!
[Wall Street Journal] .
[Local Copy] .
[CMU-Version].
11/2020
Our IMC paper on analyzing 3rd party depencies in the Web is getting some press!
[ZDNET] .
[Times Hub] .
[HelpNet Security .
[TechXplore] .
11/2020
Demo abstract paper for Vista is accepted to ACM BuildSys 2020 . Vista is
a tool to author dynamic, spatial, floorplans for overlaying real time sensor data in Buildings. Congrats Tillie (an
REU student from Swarthmore!) and Sudershan!
11/2020
Our VMCAI paper on creating probabilistic stateful models for networks is accepted! Congratulations Han,Arthur and Chi!
08/2020
Our journal extension of our BRICK+ paper is accepted to the Frontiers of the Built Environment! Congratulations Gabe, Jason, Shreyas and Charlene!
08/2020
Our IMC paper on analyzing the dependecy of the most popular websites on 3rd party DNS, CDN, and OCSP services is accepted! Congratulations Aqsa!
06/2020
WIRED magazine covers our IoT security and Privacy Label work!
[WIRED] .
[Local Archived Copy] .
05/2020
Congratulations Dr. Pardis Emami-Naeni on defending your PhD!
Awesome job! Pardis joins UW as a Post Doc.
05/2020
Our paper on ACES, a Reinforcement Learning based approach towards energy harvesting based sensors is accepted to
TOSN'20! Congratulations Francesco and Bharath!
05/2020
Our IoT Security/Privacy Labels website includes a Label Generator - check it out. Well done Shreyas and Pardis!
03/2020
Dr. Jason Koh Graduates with a PhD! Congratulations Jason! Jason joins a Building Metadata related startup.
01/2020
Our paper on Experts weighing in on the content of IoT Security/Privacy labels is accepted to Oakland S&P 2020. Congratulations Pardis! Our project website is
now online at: IoT Security Privacy
09/2019
Dohyun presented EduSense at Ubicomp 2019 in London. EduSense.io website is live and Code is on EduSense @ GitHub.
08/2019
Two papers accepted to ACM BuildSys 2019 . BRICK+, and a systematic study
of security and access control in Smart Building Apps. Congratulations Jason, Gabe, Shreyas, Sudershan!
7/2019
Our Paper on Bulding the Classroom sensing fabric of the future to smart clasrooms -- EduSense -- is accepted to IMWUT/Ubicomp'19. Congratulations Dohyun, Karan,
Franceska, and the entire ClassInsight team!
3/2019
Paper on Encouraging Energy Feedback at Work is accepted to Energy Policy 2019. Congratulations Gabrielle and Josh!
01/2019
I was interviewed by PCMag for their
Futures Article, on technology in 2039. A number of interesting perspectives. Check it out!
Publications
Recent Publications:
USENIX'23 | MobiSys'22 | Oakland'22 | ICCPS'22 | CHI'22 | CHI'22 | CHI'22 | IEEE S&P'22 |
USENIX'23 | MobiSys'22 | Oakland'22 | ICCPS'22 | CHI'22 | CHI'22 | CHI'22 | IEEE S&P'22 |
Selected Publications:
"ProtectMyPrivacy: Detecting and Mitigating Privacy Leaks on iOS Devices Using Crowdsourcing"
ACM MobiSys 2013 -- International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Taipei, June 2013.
"BuildingDepot: An Extensible and Distributed Architecture for Building Data Storage, Access and Sharing"
ACM BuildSys 2012 -- Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings, Toronto, November 2012.
(Nominated for best paper)
"Duty-Cycling Buildings Aggressively: The Next Frontier in HVAC Control"
IPSN/SPOTS 2011 -- International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, Chicago, April 2011.
"SleepServer: A Software-Only Approach for Reducing the Energy Consumption of PCs within Enterprise Environment"
USENIX ATC 2010 -- USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, MA, June 2010.
"Somniloquy: Augmenting Network Interfaces to Reduce PC Energy Usage"
USENIX NSDI 2009 -- USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, April 2009.
"WirelessWakeups Revisited: Energy Management for VoIP over WiFi Smartphones"
MobiSys 2007 -- International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Puerto Rico, June 2007.
"CoolSpots: Reducing the Power Consumption of Wireless Mobile Devices with Multiple Radio Interfaces"
MobiSys 2006 -- International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Uppsala, June 2006.
Complete list of Publications....
"ProtectMyPrivacy: Detecting and Mitigating Privacy Leaks on iOS Devices Using Crowdsourcing"
ACM MobiSys 2013 -- International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Taipei, June 2013.
"BuildingDepot: An Extensible and Distributed Architecture for Building Data Storage, Access and Sharing"
ACM BuildSys 2012 -- Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings, Toronto, November 2012.
(Nominated for best paper)
"Duty-Cycling Buildings Aggressively: The Next Frontier in HVAC Control"
IPSN/SPOTS 2011 -- International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, Chicago, April 2011.
"SleepServer: A Software-Only Approach for Reducing the Energy Consumption of PCs within Enterprise Environment"
USENIX ATC 2010 -- USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, MA, June 2010.
"Somniloquy: Augmenting Network Interfaces to Reduce PC Energy Usage"
USENIX NSDI 2009 -- USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, April 2009.
"WirelessWakeups Revisited: Energy Management for VoIP over WiFi Smartphones"
MobiSys 2007 -- International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Puerto Rico, June 2007.
"CoolSpots: Reducing the Power Consumption of Wireless Mobile Devices with Multiple Radio Interfaces"
MobiSys 2006 -- International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Uppsala, June 2006.
Complete list of Publications....
Last Updated by Yuvraj Agarwal on 11/9/2022 Back to Top