Kumar Receives ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award

Swarun Kumar, the Sathaye Family Foundation Career Development Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been awarded the ACM SIGMOBILE 2024 Rockstar Award in recognition of outstanding contributions to the design of novel techniques to extend the range of low-power networks and the development of the area of programmable targeted wireless energy delivery.

The Award recognizes an individual who has made recent outstanding research or product contributions to the field of mobile computing during the early part of their career.

Kumar’s research focuses on building next-generation wireless network protocols. In a recent project, a team of researchers, led by Kumar, developed the Wireless Actuation for Soft Electronics-free Robots (WASER) platform where the soft robot can be controlled in a non-line-of-sight context using wireless energy. The signal they use can carry through blockages like wood and walls, similar to Wi-Fi signals that we use for cell phones.