Swarun Kumar

Sathaye Family Foundation Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Affiliate: CS Department • HCI Institute • CyLab

Office: CIC Rm. 4113, 4720 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Email: swarun [at] cmu [dot] edu

Assistant: Dawn Sienko — dsienko [at] andrew [dot] cmu [dot] edu — (412)-268-9192

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I am the Sathaye Family Foundation Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s ECE department, with affiliate appointments in the CS department, the HCI Institute, and CyLab. My research builds next-generation wireless systems spanning sensing, actuation, connectivity, and intelligence. I lead the Emerging Wireless Technologies (WiTech) Lab at CMU. I am a recipient of the 2024 ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award, the 2021 SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Google Faculty Research Award. I received the George Sprowls Award for best Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science at MIT and the President of India Gold Medal at IIT Madras.

NEWS

1/26	Two papers at ACM SenSys on texture and health sensing with mmWave radar
11/25	Papers on acoustic sensing at CHI and UbiComp
9/25	Thank you IIT Madras for the Young Alumni Award
6/25	Our paper on wireless soft robots appeared at Nature Communications
9/24	Thank you ACM SIGMOBILE for the 2024 SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award
8/24	Two accepted papers at ACM MobiCom 2024
7/23	Jingxian Wang receives the 2023 ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award
4/23	Two papers at MobiCom’23 on wireless actuation and spectrum sensing
3/23	Two papers at ICRA’23 on soft robots and mmWave sensing
2/23	Paper at IPSN’23 on mmWave structural sensing
9/22	Paper on fast RFID localization accepted at UbiComp’22
5/22	Two papers at IPSN’22: Milton and SelfieStick
5/22	Two papers at CHI’22 on privacy behavior and lean privacy review
4/22	Paper on powerline backscatter accepted at NSDI’22
9/21	Swarun Kumar receives the CMU-CIT Dean’s Early Career Fellowship
5/21	Our work on NFC Textiles wins Best Paper at IPSN 2021
4/21	Thank you ACM SIGBED for the 2021 SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award

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SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS

	Pneumatically-Actuated Liquid Metal-Based Frequency Reconfigurable Antenna, Yiwen Song, Aditya Bharambe, Dinesh K Patel, Barbara Zhuo, Mason Zadan, Carmel Majidi and Swarun Kumar, Advanced Science 2026 PAPERWEBSITE
	SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures, Kuang Yuan, Yifeng Wang, Xiyuxing Zhang, Chengyi Shen, Swarun Kumar, and Justin Chan, CHI 2026 WEBSITE
	GigaFlex: Contactless Monitoring of Muscle Vibrations During Exercise with a Chaos-Inspired Radar, Jiangyifei Zhu, Yuzhe Wang, Tao Qiang, Vu Phan, Zhixiong Li, Evy Meinders, Eni Halilaj, Justin Chan and Swarun Kumar, SenSys 2026 WEBSITE
	Surface Material and Roughness Sensing using mmWave via Surface Scattering and Ambient Vibrations, Yawen Liu, Bert Shan and Swarun Kumar, SenSys 2026 WEBSITE
	TranQuiL: Long Range Detection and Localization of RFI in Radio Quiet Zones, Atul Bansal, Mohamed Ibrahim, Kuang Yuan, Yiwen Song, Swarun Kumar and Bob Iannucci, Radio Science 2026 PAPERWEBSITE
	WindDancer: Understanding Acoustic Sensing under Ambient Airflow, Kuang Yuan, Dong Li, Hao Zhou, Zhehao Li, Lili Qiu, Swarun Kumar and Jie Xiong, IMWUT 2025 PAPERWEBSITE
	DeWinder: Single-Channel Wind Noise Reduction using Ultrasound Sensing, Kuang Yuan, Shuo Han, Swarun Kumar and Bhiksha Raj, InterSpeech 2024 PAPERWEBSITE
	Shape-programming Robotic Reflectors for Wireless Networks, Yawen Liu, Akarsh Prabhakara, Jiangyifei Zhu, Shenyi Qiao, Swarun Kumar, ICRA 2025 PAPERWEBSITE
	Frequency-selective actuation of liquid crystalline elastomer actuators with radio-frequency, Yiwen Song, Zefang Li, Mason Zadan, Jingxian Wang, Swarun Kumar, Carmel Majidi, Nature Communications 2025 PAPERWEBSITE
	Thermo-Mechanically Stable, Liquid Metal Embedded Soft Materials for High-Temperature Applications, Robert Herbert, Piotr Mocny, Yuqi Zhao, Ting-Chih Lin, Junbo Zhang, Michael Vinciguerra, Sunny Surprenant, Wui Yarn Daphne Chan, Swarun Kumar, Michael R. Bockstaller, Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, Carmel Majidi, Advanced Functional Materials 2024 PAPERWEBSITE
	Reinforcement learning-based framework for whale rendezvous via autonomous sensing robots, Nishant Mehrotra, Divyanshu Pandey, Ashutosh Sabharwal, Akarsh Prabhakara, Yawen Liu and Swarun Kumar, Science Robotics 2024 PAPERWEBSITE
	Hydra: Exploiting Multi-Bounce Scattering for Beyond-Field-of-View mmWave Radar, Nishant Mehrotra, Divyanshu Pandey, Ashutosh Sabharwal, Akarsh Prabhakara, Yawen Liu and Swarun Kumar, MobiCom 2024 PAPERWEBSITE
	Guiding Energy Distribution inside Microwave Oven, Yiwen Song, Swarun Kumar, Hao Pan, Longyuan Ge, Yi-Chao Chen, and Lili Qiu, MobiCom 2024 PAPERWEBSITE
	ToMoBrush: Exploring Dental Health Sensing using a Sonic Toothbrush, Kuang Yuan, Mohamed Ibrahim, Yiwen Song, Guoxiang Deng, Robert A. Nerone, Suvendra Vijayan, Akshay Gadre, and Swarun Kumar, UbiComp 2024 PAPERWEBSITE
	A Roadmap for the Democratization of Space-Based Communications, Veronica Muriga, Swarun Kumar, Akshitha Sriraman and Assane Gueye, HotNets 2024 PAPERWEBSITE
	Towards Ubiquitous IoT through Long Range Wireless Energy Harvesting, Mohamed Ibrahim, Atul Bansal, Kuang Yuan, Junbo Zhang, and Swarun Kumar, MobiHoc 2024 PAPERWEBSITE
	TranQuiL: Long Range Detection and Localization of RFI in Radio Quiet Zones, Atul Bansal, Mohamed Ibrahim, Kuang Yuan, Yiwen Song, Swarun Kumar and Bob Iannucci, RFI (Oral) 2024 WEBSITE
	Adapting LoRa Ground Stations for Low-latency Imaging and Inference from LoRa-enabled CubeSats, Akshay Gadre, Zachary Machester, and Swarun Kumar, ACM ToSN 2024 PAPERWEBSITE

Full publication list →