Shyamnath Gollakota

Shyam Gollakota is a professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and the director of the Mobile Intelligence Lab. His research spans machine learning for mobile systems, mobile health, networking, human-computer interaction, and battery-free computing, with interdisciplinary collaborations across computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, biology, and medicine. His work includes the development of “ambient backscatter” technology, which uses existing wireless signals to power and communicate with battery-free devices. Additionally, he has created sonar-based smartphone technologies for enabling various medical applications, such as respiration anomaly detection, middle ear infection diagnosis, and opioid overdose detection. His research has won numerous prestigious awards and achieved broad real-world impact. He graduated from MIT in 2013 with a Ph.D. and received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

• 2013 - Present·University of Washington·Professor
  • Leads the Mobile Intelligence Lab focused on wireless communication, health monitoring, battery-free computing, and human-computer interaction.
  • Research technologies have been deployed to millions of users and led to multiple commercial applications.

• 2006 - 2013·Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)·Ph.D.
  • Research focus: Wireless communication and networking
  • Recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the George M. Sproull Thesis Award.
• 2002 - 2006·Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras)·Bachelor’s
  • Major in Computer Science, awarded the Institute Prize.

• 2024: Infosys Prize, Engineering and Computer Science
• 2021: Moore Inventor Fellowship
• 2020: ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
• 2017: SIGMOBILE RockStar Award
• 2016: Popular Science “Ten Brilliant Scientists”
• 2014: MIT Technology Review “35 Innovators Under 35”
• 2013: ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Award
• 2012: ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award