SyNRG
S3
Romit & Yu-Lin present tutorial on Generative Models at MobiCom'24

The tutorial aims to develop the foundations of generative models like VAEs, GANs, Diffusion, Transformers etc. from first principles.
December 2024

S3
Our binaural source separation paper accepted to ICML'22

This paper explores a self-supervised technique for binaural source separation by region, which relaxes the maximum number of sources constraint. (Led by Alan)
May 2022

earable_website
Our new earable computing website launched

Check out our latest works in the area of earable computing here. We are also looking for new PhD students to join us in this area.
Dec 2020

ear-AR
EarSense accepted to MobiCom’20

EarSense exploits jack re-tasking of audio chips and proposes algorithms to sense and localize a set of gestures made by teeth, on COTS headphone/earphones. It would enable applications ranging from accessibilities on smart-devices, security, hand-free interfaces to sensing for health. (Led by Jay)
Aug 2020

jayden_ibm
HawkEye accepted to CVPR’20

HawkEye enables high resolution mmWave imaging for self driving cars even in low visibility conditions. (Led by Jayden)
Feb 2020

Sheng
Sheng accepts Facebook

Sheng will join Facebook AR/VR in Jan 2020. Congratulations!
Sep 2019

Daniel
Daniel joined Mercedes-Benz R&D

Daniel graduated with a M.S. and joined Mercedes-Benz R&D. Congratulations!
May 2019

Haitham
Haitham wins 2019 Sloan Research Fellowship

The Sloan Research Fellowship is given to early-career scholars who are the most promising scientific researchers working today. Congratulations to Haitham!
Feb 2019

millinet
BounceNet accepted to NSDI’19

BounceNet presents a many-to-many millimeter wave beam alignment protocol that can exploit dense spatial reuse to allow many links to operate in parallel and scale the wireless throughput with the number of clients. (Led by Suraj)
Nov 2018

Ghostbuster
MUSE and Ghostbuster accepted to MobiCom'18

MUSE aims at improving today's IMU sensor fusion algorithms, while Ghostbuster can detect the presence of radios that silently eavesdrop on wireless communication. (Led by Sheng and Anadi)
July 2018

Sheng Shen
Congrats on internship offers

Congrats to Ashutosh, Suraj and Amod for accepting internships to NEC Labs, Microsoft Research and Amazon Lab 126, respectively.
March 2018

Homer Lake BBQ
SyNRG BBQ @ Homer Lake
April 2018

Haitham
Haitham receives NSF CAREER Award

For developing agile and scalable mmWave networks. Congratulations!
March 2018

Mahanth
Mahanth joining Penn State Faculty

Mahanth will join the CS department of Pennsylvania State University as a tenure track professor from spring 2018. Congratulations!
May 2017

UIUC
SyNRG celebrates Mahanth's defense!

Oct 2017

Sheng Shen
Sheng wins Rambus Fellowship

Sheng Shen was recently awarded the the Rambus Fellowship in Electrical and Computer Engineering for 2017-2018.
Apr 2017

Haitham Hassanieh
Haitham joins and co-leads the SyNRG group

Haitham Hassanieh is a new Assistant Professor in the ECE Department at UIUC. His research is in the area of computer networks and algorithms.
Jan 2016

Puneet Jain
Puneet graduates with PhD

And now a researcher at HP Labs in Palo Alto. Congratulations, Puneet!
May 2016

Insight
Insight accepted to MobiSys'15

Insight develops techniques using which humans can be visually recognized. Complementary to face recognition, Insight exploits the intuition that motion patterns and clothing colors may pose as a human fingerprint, adequate to discriminate one individual from others. (Led by He)
Feb 2015

CHEF
CHEF wins Runners Up Award at MobiCom'15 Student Research Competition (SRC)

The goal of this project is to uniquely fingerprint an environment in the visual domain. See poster here. (Led by Puneet)
Jun 2015

Nirupam Roy
Nirupam wins 2016 Joan and Lalit Bahl fellowship

The fellowship will be in the amount of $20,000.
Feb 2016

Puneet
Puneet joins HP Labs. Congratulations!

Jul 2015

MIT Technology Review
ActivPass appears in MIT Technology Review

See the report here, paper here.
More details in this audio interview to BBC (starting 26:30)
Apr 2015

Justin
Romit (PC Chair) and Justin (General Chair) will be organizing HotMobile'15. Consider submitting.

See the HotMobile 2015 website here.
Feb 2014

S3
OracleBO accepted to AAAI'24

OracleBO formulates a human centric black-box optimization problem where an Oracle can reveal information about the minimizer function to achieve a lower query budget. (Led by Rajalaxmi)
February 2024

S3
AlterNet accepted to NeurIPS'23 ML4Audio Workshop

AlterNet utilizes two signals of different modalities the earphone-IMU and Noisy microphone recordings to achieve Self-Supervised Speech Enchancement. (Led by Yu-Lin)
December 2023

hrtf
UNIQ accepted to SIGCOMM’21

UNIQ enables better spatial acoustics on earables by estimating personalized HRTF using COTS mobile devices. (Led by Zhijian)
May 2021

Romit gives talks on earable computing

Romit gives talks at Oxford Univ., Cambridge Univ. and NUS , discussing the problem space of “Earables” as a next step to Wearable Computing.
Jan 2020

trackio
TrackIO accepted to NSDI’19

TrackIO tracks firefighters inside a building using a drone outside. (Led by Ashutosh)
Nov 2018

Nirupam
Nirupam accepts Univ. of Maryland

Nirupam will join the CS department of the University of Maryland, College Park as a tenure track professor from Spring 2019. Congratulations!
May 2018

LiquID
LiquID accepted to MobiSys'18

LiquID shows the feasibility of identifying liquids by shining UWB wireless signals through them and computing their complex permittivity. (Led by Ashutosh)
Feb 2018

UIUC
SyNRG welcomes new students!

And best wishes to Jason, our summer intern!
Sept 2017

Workshop
Romit gives a talk at NSF Early Career Workshop, 2017

Slides are here: pdf
July 2017

DroneNet
DroneNet accepted to HotMobile'17

DroneNet explores if drones can fill gaps in cellular coverage using ray-tracing to predict potential drone placement. DroneNet also wins Runners Up Award at MobiCom'16 Student Research Competition (SRC). (Led by Ashutosh)
Jan 2017

VibraPhone accepted to MobiSys'16

VibraPhone demonstrates the feasibility of using the vibration motor in mobile devices as a sound sensor, almost like a microphone. (Led by Nirupam)
Feb 2016

Haitham's Thesis
Haitham's thesis wins 2016 Sprowls award

Haitham's thesis on "The Sparse Fourier Transform: Theory & Practice" wins the 2016 Sprowls award for best thesis in Computer Science at MIT.
Nov 2016

Romit Roy Choudhury
Romit wins 2016 CS @ ILLINOIS Distinguished Alumni Award

This award is in recognition of "alumni and faculty members who have made professional, technical, educational, or service contributions that bring distinction to themselves, the department, and the university."
Nov 2016

SyNRG Turkey Run
SyNRG party at Turkey Run State Park

Canoe trips were great fun... one canoe flipped but we all survived!
May 2016

Romit Roy Choudhury
Romit wins 2015 ACM Sigmobile Rockstar Award

Romit Roy Choudhury was recently awarded the 2015 ACM SIGMOBILE RockStar Award in recognition of "significant contributions, early in his career, to mobile sensing and wireless networking, with an emphasis on location and cross-layer protocols".
May 2015

Ashutosh
Ashutosh joins the SyNRG group. Welcome!

Aug 2014

HotNets 2014
Our work on wireless infrastructure mobility accepted to HotNets'14

This paper envisions the possibility of injecting mobility into wireless infrastructure. See paper here.
Sept 2014

COMSNETS 2014
Our paper on driver detection appeared in COMSNETS'14

This work was awarded best poster in MobiSys 2011. See paper here.
Jan 2014

Samsung Research
Xuan Bao joins Samsung Research America. Congratulations!

Jul 2013

S3
OracleBO accepted to NeurIPS'23 ML4Audio Workshop

OracleBO employs a sample-constrained Black-Box Bayesian Optimization technique using Human-in-the-loop to solve High-dimensional problems in applications like Audio Personalization. (Led by Rajalaxmi)
December 2023

S3
S3 accepted to NSDI’21

S3 is a new efficient real-time wideband spectrum sensing mechanism that can work in densely occupied spectrum. It leverages recent advances in RF MEMS filtering solution that enables sampling the spectrum along the frequency axis. (Led by Jayden)
Mar 2021

Qualcomm
Jayden and Suraj win the 2020 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

They presented Hawkeye, a system that enables high resolution mmWave imaging for self driving cars even in low visibility conditions.
Sep 2020

ear-AR
Ear-AR accepted to MobiCom’20

Ear-AR enables indoor acoustic augmented reality (AAR) on modern earphones. We leverage on-ear IMUs to do accurate indoor localization as well as head tracking, and then play binural audios accordingly. (Led by Zhijian)
Aug 2020

jayden_ibm
Jayden's internship work at IBM Research accepted to RFIC'20

This paper presented a system that can create a 3D image of the physical environment surrounding a mmWave directional communications device using reflected communications waveforms. (Led by Jayden)
Feb 2020

Ashutosh
Ashutosh accepts Georgia Tech

Ashutosh will join the CS department of the Georgia Institute of Technology as a tenure track professor from Fall 2019. Congratulations!
May 2019

Amod
Amod joined Amazon

Amod graduated with a M.S. and joined Amazon Lab 126. Congratulations!
May 2019

UIUC
SyNRG celebrates Nirupam's defense!

Dec 2018

NAE
NAE Radio covers our research

on using wireless to help noise cancellation. The recording can be found <here>. The research is also covered on IEEE Spectrum
Sept 2018

SyNRG SIGCOMM
Congrats to Suraj for winning the SIGCOMM'18 Student Research Competition (SRC)

This is for his project, MilliNet, which aims to enable dense spatial reuse in mmWave networks.
Aug 2018

Google
Google sponsors SyNRG

For research on acoustic sensing, communications, and various challenges around voice attacks and privacy.
March 2018

"Inaudible Voice Attacks" solved in NSDI'18 paper

Recent work has shown that inaudible signals (at ultrasound frequencies) can be designed to become audible to microphones at very short distances. We develop such an attack that achieves 25 feet range, and then develop a defense against this class of voice attacks that exploit non-linearity. (Led by Nirupam)
Dec 2017

Romit Roy Choudhury
Romit named Faculty Scholar

Romit Roy Choudhury was recently awarded the the W.J. “Jerry” Sanders III – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Scholar in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Apr 2017

ArmTrak accepted to MobiSys'16

ArmTrak is designed to track the geometric motion of the human arm using only the inertial sensors on the smartwatch. (Led by Sheng)
Feb 2016

Overlay
OverLay accepted to MobiSys'15

Mobile augmented reality (AR) has been an exciting, yet unrealized, vision. This paper attempts to complete the vision within the constraints of today’s smartphones. (Led by Puneet)
Feb 2015

WWW 2016
Robotic Wireless Networks accepted to WWW'16

In this paper we explore the possibility of injecting mobility into wireless network infrastructure. (Led by Mahanth)
Dec 2015

Qualcomm
Nirupam and Shaileshh reach finals of 2016 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship contest

They recently presented Ripple at Qualcomm's headquarters in San Diego.
Feb 2016

Mahanth
HiBo accepted to ICNP'16

Hierarchical Backoff (HiBo) aims to compress randomized contention overhead for high density networks. (Led by Mahanth)
Jun 2016

ICWSM 2014
CrowdCast accepted to ICWSM'14

This paper proposes CrowdCast, a cloud-based framework to enable real-time analysis and prediction from streaming social data. (Led by Puneet)
Mar 2014

MobiSys 2014
WalkCompass accepted to MobiSys'14

This paper describes WalkCompass, a system that exploits smartphone sensors to estimate the direction in which a user is walking. (Led by Nirupam)
Mar 2014

Hotmobile 2014
Injecting Life into Toys accepted to HotMobile'14

This paper envisions a future in which smartphones can be inserted into toys, such as a teddy bear, to make them interactive to children. See paper here. (Led by Mahanth)
Dec 2013

SenSys 2013
FOCUS appeared to SenSys'13

See paper here. (Led by Puneet)
Jul 2013

UIUC
SyNRG group picture from 2013

The most profound technologies are those that disappear - Mark Weiser.
Aug 2013

S3
RoSS accepted to ICRA'23

RoSS explores underdetermined source separation using microphone rotations that can produce “delay aliasing” between two interferers, causing them to appear as one, thereby reducing to a determined problem. (Led by Hyungjoo)
May 2023

S3
PoseKernelLifter accepted to CVPR'22

PoseKernelLifter explores an acoustic and vision fusion method, utilizing existing smarthome devices to recover the exact metric scale 3D human pose. (Led by Zhijian)
March 2022

hrtf
Bashima named Forbes 30 under 30.

Forbes 30 Under 30 identifies people under 30 years old who has made significant early career contributions to their fields. Bashima is named in the Forbes 30 under 30 science category. Congratulations!
Dec 2021

iaoa
Array signal processing paper iAoA accepted to ICASSP’21

iAoA addresses the problem of estimating K angle of arrivals (AoA) using an array of M > K microphones, for unknown and correlated source signals. (Led by Wally)
Feb 2021

voloc
VoLoc accepted to MobiCom’20

VoLoc shows the feasibility of inferring indoor user location from acoustic signals, for smart voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. (Led by Sheng)
Jan 2020

ear-AR
μ-link accepted to MobiCom’20

μ-link takes the preliminary step looking into the communication basics for an inbody network of biomedical devices, which move along vessels and encode information on particles. (Led by Jiaming)
Aug 2020

heidelberg
Yu-Lin attends Heidelberg Laureate Forum

Yu-Lin is selected as one of the 200 young researchers all over the world to attend the heidelberg Laureate Forum. Congratulations!
Sep 2019

Sheng and Suraj
Sheng and Suraj win Fellowships

Congrats to Sheng and Suraj for winning the M.E. Van Valkenburg Graduate Research Award
May 2019

Romit
Romit elected IEEE Fellow

Romit has been elected Class 2019 IEEE Fellow for contributions to wireless network protocols and indoor localization. Congratulations!
Nov 2018

MUTE and Agile-Link accepted to SIGCOMM'18

MUTE exploits the velocity gap between RF and sound to improve active noise cancellation, while Agile-Link finds the best mmWave beam alignment without scanning the space. (Led by Sheng and Haitham)
May 2018

NYT
The New York Times mentions ...

our work on inaudible voice commands and how long range attacks are possible from 25ft away.
May 2018

Sheng and Suraj
Suraj and Sheng win Fellowships

Congrats to Suraj for winning the Rambus fellowship, Sheng for winning the Ok Kyun Kim fellowship and the Yee fellowship.
March 2018

BackDoor
BackDoor wins MobiSys'17 Best Paper Award

BackDoor shows high-frequency ultrasonic sounds can be designed to be recordable by unmodified smartphone microphones while remaining inaudible to humans, leading to applications including inaudible acoustic-jammer and in-air acoustic communication for IoT devices. (Led by Nirupam)
June 2017

Haitham
Haitham receives ACM 2016 Doctoral Dissertation Award

Hassanieh developed highly efficient algorithms for computing the Sparse Fourier Transform, and demonstrated their applicability in many domains including networks, graphics, medical imaging and biochemistry.
May 2017

iBall
iBall accepted to NSDI'17

We explore the possibility of bringing IoT to sports analytics, particularly to the game of Cricket. We develop solutions to track a ball’s 3D trajectory and spin with inexpensive sensors and radios embedded in the ball. (Led by Mahanth)
Dec 2016

Mahanth
SafetyNet accepted to MobiCom'16

SafetyNet estimates the drone's 3D orientation using multiple GPS receivers ... offers a backup to IMU failures. (Led by Mahanth)
Jun 2016

He Wang
He Wang accepts Purdue

He will join the CS department of Purdue University as a tenure track professor. Congratulations!
Mar 2016

NSDI 2016
Ripple II accepted to NSDI'16

We are envisioning physical vibration as a new mode of communication between mobile devices. See paper here. (Led by Nirupam)
Dec 2015

MobiCom 2015
MoLe accepted to MobiCom'15

Imagine a user typing on a laptop keyboard while wearing a smart watch. This paper asks whether motion sensors from the watch can leak information about what the user is typing. See video here. (Led by He)
Jun 2015

CHI 2015
ActivPass accepted to CHI'15

This paper explores the feasibility of automatically extracting passwords from a user’s daily activity logs, such as her Facebook activity, phone activity etc.
Jan 2015

NSDI 2015
Ripple accepted to NSDI'15

This paper investigates the possibility of communicating through vibrations. (Led by Nirupam)
Jan 2015

Sheng
Sheng joins the SyNRG group. Welcome!

Aug 2014

NDSS 2014
AccelPrint accepted to NDSS'14

This paper submits a hypothesis that smartphone/tablet accelerometers possess unique fingerprints, which can be exploited for tracking users.
Nov 2013

Microsoft Research IBM Research
He and Mahanth back from MSR internships, Puneet from IBM Research
Sept 2013