Professional

Research experience

Postdoctoral research

2016-present: School of Computing, National University of Singapore

Personalized Travel Activity Detection on Highly Resource-constrained Wearables
Developed a wearable system that detects the user's travel activities (e.g. home, office, lunch, bus service number) in real-time, using a memory, compute, and power-constrained TI sensor tag. The algorithm does not use any high-power location sensors, leading to a battery life of over 20 days on just a coin cell. The user can view a timeline of his/her travel activities by sync-ing the wearable using Bluetooth LE to the associated Android application. Evaluation shows higher accuracy in comparison to Google's GPS-based Maps Timeline.

Doctoral research

2010-2016: School of Computing, National University of Singapore

Smartphone-based Decentralized Public-transport Applications
Proposed novel techniques for building decentralized public-transport applications on smartphones that do not require an Internet connection or a central server. The barometer sensor and local user collaboration are used to tackle the key challenges of context detection, route and transit-stop detection, and deployment of transport applications. The system makes very few assumptions about infrastructure, enabling it to work in developing countries where other approaches fail. The use of the barometer sensor makes the system independent of user hand movement and phone placement, and reduces power consumption.

Bachelors research

2009-2010: PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India, in collaboration with Old Dominion University, Virginia, USA

Multi-core Implementation of Planted Motif Problem
Described and implemented a multi-core implementation of the Sagot algorithm for solving the challenging (21, 8) case of the Planted Motif Problem in bioinformatics. Evaluation on a 16-core system, and comparison to the state-of-the-art multi-core bit-based approach that requires 1 GB of memory and 1 hour execution time, shows that our algorithm is able to solve the problem in 2 hours, but using only 50 MB of memory, resulting in a 95\% space saving with a trade-off of 2X running time.

Work experience

Research Fellow

2016-present: School of Computing, National University of Singapore
funded through the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) program

Research Assistant

2014-2016: School of Computing, National University of Singapore
funded through the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) program

Teaching Assistant

2011-2014: School of Computing, National University of Singapore
Teaching score: 4.75/5

  1. CS3103 Computer Networks and Protocols (4 semesters)
  2. CS4222 Wireless Computing and Sensor Networks (4 semesters)

Android tutorials
As part of my teaching duties, I also conducted Android tutorials for students. Links to the tutorials are below:

  1. Android Tutorial 1
  2. Android Tutorial 2

Professional affiliations and voluntary activities

  • IEEE Member: 2011 - present
  • ACM Member: 2014 - present
  • Reviewer: IEEE TMC journal, IEEE SECON 2015 conference, ACM UbiComp 2016 conference, Elsevier ComCom journal, IJSN 2016 journal
  • Technical Program Committee: COMSNETS 2016 conference
  • Mentoring:
    Mentored students from NUS Singapore, MIT Boston, ETH Zurich, and SUTD Singapore during the week-long SMART Future of Science, Technology and Policy workshop on the topic of 'Smart Nation'. This included visits to the Singapore government agencies URA, LTA, MoT, HDB, PUB, NEA, and IDA to discuss the role of science and technology on public policy in Singapore, followed by a proposal and presentation by local and foreign students to apply their area of expertise in the context of Singapore (June 2016)
  • Talks:
    "Personalized Travel Activity Detection on Resource-constrained Wearables", Future Mobility Symposium, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (July 2017)
  • Training:
    Conducted a 1-day training course for the computer science faculty of PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India, on understanding and programming the Freescale HCS12X microcontroller for embedded systems (Jan 2009)

Awards

  1. NUS Research Scholarship: National University of Singapore, Aug 2010 - July 2014
  2. Intel Threading Champion Competition Award:
    Awarded a grant from Intel, Bangalore, India, to setup the Intel research lab in PES Institute of Technology
  3. Prof. M R Doreswamy Scholarship Award: 1st rank in first 4 semesters of Bachelors
  4. Distinction Awards: Distinction in every semester of Bachelors