Associate Professor,
MIT
Co-Founder, Cartesian
Systems (startup)
Founding Director,
Signal Kinetics Research Group
MIT Media
Lab &
Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science
BRIEF BIO: I am an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and EECS. I direct the Signal Kinetics group which invents, builds, and deploys wireless technologies that sense, communicate through, and interact with the physical world in unprecedented ways. Taking a broad view of wireless across radio, acoustics, vibrations, and vision, our work spans the human body, built environments, and the natural world, with applications in networking, health, robotics, commerce, and ocean IoT.
My research has led to multiple startups translating fundamental advances in sensing into real-world systems. I am currently co-founder of Cartesian Systems, whose indoor spatial AI platform helps retailers streamline operations and is deployed in over 700 stores across 15 countries. Prior to that, my PhD research on wireless sensing, which received the ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award, led to Emerald Innovations, whose devices are used for remote health monitoring of thousands of patients.
My work has been recognized through honors including MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35, the Young Global Leader recognition by the World Economic Forum, and the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award. My research was recognized as one of the 50 ways MIT has transformed computer science and one of the 103 ways MIT is making a better world. I have presented my research to multiple heads of state, including demoing to President Obama at the White House. My research has also been broadly featured in public media, and videos featuring my work have reached over 25 million people.
Before joining MIT as faculty, I received my Master's (2013) and PhD (2016) in Computer Science from MIT and my Bachelor's (2011) from the American University of Beirut.
Interested in joining my research group? You can find information on how to apply for MS/PhD, MEng, postdoc, UROP, and software/hardware/ML engineer positions here.
Interested in joining my startup? We have openings for full-time ML scientists, engineers, and interns (grad & undergrad) at Cartesian.
Research Overview
My team's current research on wireless and sensor technologies focuses on three main areas:
- Ocean IoT: including batteryless networking, underwater GPS, backscatter theory, underwater-to-air communications, battery-free wireless cameras, and underwater AI.
- Imaging with Wireless Signals: including non-line-of-sight 3D reconstruction, generative-AI-powered wireless vision, and indoor scene reconstruction.
- Robot/Drone Perception and Manipulation: including RF-Visual reinforcement learning, mechanical search, and drone localization/navigation with millimeter-wave backscatter tags.
My past research includes:
- Seeing through walls with WiFi: including 3D tracking, gesture recognition, and reconstructing human figures through walls.
- Smart homes that measure vital signs including breathing, heartbeats, micro-cardiac events, emotions, and stress levels.
- Batteryless micro-implants for in-body connectivity, sensing, self-reconfiguring with security/privacy.
- RFID and RFID-vision fusion: localization, tracking, food/liquid sensing, drone-based inventory, reinforcement learning, robotic picking, and augmented reality.
Finally, stories behind my research have been featured in a podcast interview with MIT President Sally Kornbluth, an MIT News profile about my junior faculty journey, and an IEEE Spectrum profile of my PhD research.
Recent News
- Our paper on bringing all modulations to underwater backscatter received the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at ACM SenSys'26.
- My PhD alum, Saad Afzal, receives the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Runner-Up Award.
- MIT News covers our new generative-AI methods for wireless vision, including two upcoming CVPR'26 papers:
- Two papers from the group receive the ACM SIGMOBILE Research Highlights Award.
- Two papers at ACM SenSys'26 push the boundaries of underwater
backscatter:
- Piezo-Ultrasonic Backscatter: Low-power high-throughput underwater networking
- Bringing All Modulations to Underwater Backscatter via PDM-Synthesis
- Check out my latest talk about our research on underwater IoT (SIGCOMM'25):
- We invented mmNorm: a new way for millimeter-wave imaging and 3D
reconstruction via surface normal estimation:
- Our paper won the Best Paper Runner-Up and the Best Poster Award at ACM MobiSys'25.
- Check out this video explainer and demo:
Selected Awards & Honors
- MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 (2014)
- Forbes 30 Under 30 (2015)
- ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award (2018)
- NSF CAREER Award (2019)
- ONR Young Investigator Award (2019)
- Sloan Research Fellowship (2021)
- ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award (2022)
- ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award (2023)
- Great Arab Mind (2023)
- Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum (2024)
My Team
Graduate Students:
- Waleed Akbar (award-winning papers in Nature Communications'22, ACM WUWNet'22, ACM MobiCom'23, ACM SenSys'26)
- Laura Dodds (MIT Presidential Fellow, MIT EECS Best MEng Thesis Award, award-winning papers in IEEE RFID'23 and ACM MobiSys'25)
- Nazish Naeem (award-winning papers in ACM WUWNet'23, IEEE RFID'23, ACM SenSys'26)
- Maisy Lam (NSF GRFP Fellow, award-winning paper in IEEE RFID'23)
- Jack Rademacher (award-winning paper in ACM WUWNet'22)
- Purui Wang (award-winning paper in ACM WUWNet'22)
- Weitung Chen (MIT Jacobs Presidential Fellow, award-winning paper in IEEE RFID'23)
- Rohan Menon (MIT Jacobs Presidential Fellow)
- You? We're always looking for ambitious students to join us. Prior fellowships are not required; many students receive fellowships and publish their first papers after joining the lab.
Administrative: Aimee Schroeder (Senior Administrative Assistant)
Alumni (PhDs):
- Tara Boroushaki (2025, named Marconi Young Scholar, now Assistant Professor at Yale)
- Sayed Saad Afzal (2025, winner of ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Runner-Up Award, now at Apple)
- Mohamed Radwan Abdelhamid (2021, co-advised w/ Anantha Chandrakasan, now at Apple)
Alumni (Postdocs): Reza Ghaffarivardavagh (Apple → OpenAI), Yunfei Ma (Alibaba → Uber), Aline Eid (Assistant Professor at University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor), Unsoo Ha (Apple), and Ahmed Allam (University of Cincinnati).
Teaching
I believe in open and accessible education, and make my teaching material available to the public.
- Undergraduate:
- The "IoT" Class (Mobile and Sensor Computing), Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2025, Spring 2026
- Graduate:
- How To Wirelessly Sense Almost Anything, Fall 2022
- Ocean IoT: Technologies, Industries, Sustainability, Fall 2021
- Emerging Wireless and Mobile Technologies, Fall 2020
- Computational Wireless Sensing, Fall 2019
- Computer Networks, Fall 2017
Selected Press Coverage
Ocean IoT and underwater communication was covered by The Economist, IEEE Spectrum, BBC, National Geographic, TechCrunch, World Economic Forum, and MIT News.
Battery-free underwater camera was covered by MIT News, CBC, CNET, National Geographic, Aljazeera, and others.
RFID micro-sensing and robotic perception was covered by The Wall Street Journal, MIT News, Popular Science, TechCrunch, BBC, CACM, RFID Journal, and The Verge.
Wireless sensing for health, vitals, and emotion was covered by New Scientist, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, CBS, and Wired.
Seeing through walls was covered by The Washington Post, BBC, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Popular Science, Fast Company, and Wired.
Our White House Demo to President Obama was covered by The White House Press Office, MIT News, NBC News, and The Wall Street Journal.
Finally, one of the fun highlights of my research is an entire episode in The Big Bang Theory about our emotion detection device.