Prof. Dr. Ambuj Varshney

STICORS: Framework for Ubiquitous, Privacy-Preserving, Sticker Form-Factor, Everlasting, Wireless Computers

flexible form factor sensor
We illustrate a proof-of-concept, flexible-form, wireless computer that can through reflection and absorption of ambient wireless signals (building on LoRea (ACM SENSYS 2017)) achieve significant transmission range.

Project PI: Prof. Dr. Ambuj Varshney

Vision

The goal of this project is to develop a framework to manage large-scale deployments of sticker computers (STICORS) that are packed with sensors, processors, energy storage, and human-computer interaction mechanisms, and that can connect wirelessly over long distances. These computers will be able to handle a range of advanced computing and communication tasks. This framework has the potential to support a wide range of applications, but we are focusing on designing a platform for analytics on massive amounts of data collected (from physical world) using STICORS.

STICORS is a research project that requires expertise in multiple engineering fields, including electronics, communication, computer science, and materials science. At present, the goals of the STICORS project are not yet attainable and will require significant scientific advances, which are also the major focus of the STICORS project.

We are targetting following parameters for STICORS computers:

On the network side, we are interested in the following:

News

[Q4, 2022] Prof. Ambuj Varshney presented the vision of STICORS at ceremony of 2022 ABB Research Award in Honour of Hubertus von Grünberg, held at Baden, Switzerland. Guests in the attendance included the CEO of ABB - Björn Rosengren, ex-chairman of ABB Hubertus von Grünberg, senior management of the company, and other dignitaries

Presentation at ABB Award Presentation at ABB Award

[Q4, 2022] GRANT: STICORS received second grant at National University of Singapore from ARTIC for sensing using tunnel diodes. We are going to focus on sensing breathing and heartbeats using flexible form factor sensors.

[Q2, 2022] NEW MEMBER: Qiao Yukai starts to work on his masters thesis on collecting and analysing data from STICORS

[Q2, 2022] GRANT: STICORS received first grant at National University of Singapore from ODPRT (Startup Grant)

[Q1, 2022] Project Investigator (Prof. Ambuj Varshney) has joined as a faculty member at the School of Computing of the National University of Singapore.

Background

TBA

Application Scenarios

We are targetting two application scenarios:

Collaborators

Prabal Dutta (Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley)
Christian Rohner (Professor, Uppsala University, Sweden)
Prateek Saxena (Associate Professor, National University of Singapore)

Students

Graduate Research Associates

Presentation at ABB Award Wenqing Yan (Ph.D. Student, Uppsala University, Sweden)

Undergraduate Research Associates

Open-source Contributors

Other Contributors

Industry Contributors

Advisory Board

TBD

Policy for Intellectual Property

STICORS has the potential to significantly impact multiple fields and bring value to society. We are committed to openly publishing and releasing our software and hardware designs using a BSD-style license and will only seek intellectual property protection for our research results if it is necessary to ensure their impact. We prioritize continuous innovation and improvement over reliance on patents.

Press Releases and News Coverage

Publications

STICORS is an ongoing research project at the National University of Singapore. Our sincere gratitude goes out to former advisors, collaborators and students of the PI at many of the world’s foremost institutions for their contributions to this effort. In addition, they have contributed to peer-reviewed scientific publications that have appeared at several flagship scientific venues. We list these research efforts below:

Overview

  1. Making Low-power and Long-range Wireless Backscatter Transmitters
    Author: Ambuj Varshney
    ACM GetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications (Maker Edition) 2022

Human Computer Interaction

  1. Battery-free Visible Light Sensing
    Authors: Ambuj Varshney, Andreas Soleiman, Luca Mottola, Thiemo Voigt
    ACM VLCS (Co-located with ACM MobiCom) 2017
    Best Paper Award
    ACM Student Research Competition Winner (Graduate, MobiCom)

Sensing

  1. TunnelLiFi: Bringing LiFi to Commodity Devices
    Authors: Muhammad Sarmad Mir, Wenqing Yan, Prabal Dutta, Domenico Giustiniano, and Ambuj Varshney
    The Twenty-fourth International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (ACM HotMobile 2023)

  2. POSTER: Enabling L3: Low Cost, Low Complexity and Low Power Radio Frequency Sensing using Tunnel Diodes Authors: Wenqing Yan, Ambuj Varshney
    The Twenty Eight Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking (ACM MobiCom 2022)

  3. Demonstration: Towards Battery-free Radio Tomographic Imaging
    Authors: Abdullah Hylamia,Ambuj Varshney, Andreas Soleiman, et al.
    The Eleventh ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (ACM WiSec-2018)
    Best demonstration award

Transmission

  1. Judo: Addressing the Energy Asymmetry of Wireless Embedded Systems through Tunnel Diode based Wireless Transmitters
    Authors: Ambuj Varshney , Wenqing Yan, Prabal Dutta
    The Twentieth ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (ACM MobiSys 2022)

  2. TunnelEmitter:Tunnel Diode based Low-Power Carrier Emitters for Backscatter Tags
    Authors: Ambuj Varshney, Lorenzo Corneo
    The Twenty Sixth Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking (ACM MobiCom 2020)

  3. TunnelScatter: Low Power Communication for Sensor Tags using Tunnel Diodes
    Authors: Ambuj Varshney, Andreas Soleiman, Thiemo Voigt
    The Twenty Fifth Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking (ACM MobiCom 2019)

  4. LoRea: A Backscatter Architecture that Achieves a Long Communication Range
    Authors: Ambuj Varshney, Oliver Harms, Carlos Penichet, Christian Rohner , Frederik Hermans, Thiemo Voigt
    Fifteenth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (ACM SENSYS 2017)
    2019 ABB Research Award Winner

  5. Towards wide-area backscatter networks
    Authors: Ambuj Varshney, Carlos Perez Penichet, Christian Rohner, Thiemo Voigt
    ACM HotWireless (Co-located with ACM MobiCom) 2017

Reception

  1. Two to Tango: Hybrid Light and Backscatter Networks for Next Billion Devices
    Authors: Ambuj Varshney, Ander Galiesto, Domenico Giustiniano
    The Eighteenth ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (ACM MobiSys 2020)

  2. Connecting Battery-free IoT Tags Using LED Bulbs
    Authors: Domenico Giustiniano ,Ambuj Varshney, Thiemo Voigt
    The Eighteenth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (ACM HotNets 2019)

  3. Battery-free 802.15.4 Receiver
    Authors: Carlos Perez Penichet, Claro Noda,Ambuj Varshney, Thiemo Voigt
    The Seventeenth ACM/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks.(ACM/IEEE IPSN 2018)

Storage

TBA

Processing

TBA

Security

  1. Securing Battery-free Backscatter Tags through Fingerprinting
    Authors: Revathy Narayanan, Ambuj Varshney, et al.
    The Twentieth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (ACM HotNets 2021)

Energy

TBA

Analytics

Funding

STICORS is generously supported (or have been previously supported) through grants from following agencies: