Sirius is a self-localization system using a single receiver for low-power IoT nodes. It explores the use of gain-pattern reconfigurable antennas with passive envelope detector-based radios to perform AoA estimation without requiring any kind of synchronization.
Best poster award
ThermWare is a non-intrusive screening method to detect anomalous operations on embedded devices at run-time. It analyses subtle heat patterns of electronic circuits during code execution to detect any malicious activities.
Backdoor shows that these high frequency sounds can be designed to become recordable by unmodified microphones, while remaining inaudible to humans.Applications include short-range data communication, jamming spy microphones in the environment, live watermarking of music in a concert, and even acoustic denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and inaudible voice command attacks to voice assistants.
Best paper award
Heading the ball is a fundamental skill in soccer. This project develops a method to assess the impact of head-ball contacts using the Adidas micoach soccer ball and an on-body inertial sensor.
Student research competition winner
Malicious editing of audiovisual content has emerged as a popular tool for targeted defamation, spreading disinformation, and triggering political unrest. TalkLock is a live speech integrity verification system that can enable live speakers to protect their speeches from malicious alterations even when the speech is recorded by any member of the audience.
Data communication has been studied over a wide range of modalities, including radio frequency (RF), acoustic, visible light, etc. This project envisions vibration as a new mode of secure short-range communication through physical touch. We engineer a completely functional prototype, which entails a full OFDM stack, coping with ADC saturation, synchronization, error coding, and interleaving.
Mobile computing has traditionally implied mobile clients connected to a static infrastructure. This project breaks away from this point of view and envisions the possibility of injecting mobility into infrastructure.
This projects shows that the hardware imperfections leads to identifiable unique features in sensor data called fingerprints. Attackers can leverage such fingerprints to track smartphones.
Best poster runner-up award
SPiDR is an ultra-low-power acoustic perception system that produces a cross-sectional map of the field-of-view using only one speaker/microphone pair. It leverages sound’s interaction with small structures to project spatially coded signals for imaging.
Best paper award
This project is our first step toward a long-term research commitment focused around developing low-latency sensing-inferencing mechanism to defend autonomous systems against high-speed dynamic obstacles and projectile objects. We particularly target SWAP-C constrained miniature robots and drones.
This project presents LidarPhone, a novel acoustic side-channel attack through the LIDAR sensors equipped in popular commodity robot vacuum cleaners. The core idea is to repurpose the lidar to a laser-based microphone that can sense sounds from subtle vibrations induced on nearby objects. LidarPhone carefully processes and extracts traces of sound signals from inherently noisy laser reflections to capture privacy sensitive information.
Best poster runner-up award
VibraPhone demonstrates the feasibility of using the vibration motor in mobile devices as a sound sensor, almost like a microphone.
Owlet is a low-power and miniaturized system for measuring spatial information from sound. Owlet uses acoustic microstructures to embed direction-specific signatures on the recorded sound and develops a transfer learning-based approach signal direction estimation and localization in real-time.
Best demo award
Urban greenspaces are untapped assets in infrastructure improvement and disaster mitigation. Project BRIDGE augments greenspace with broadband infrastructure to mitigate digital divide and improve community resilience.
Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) is a classical area where noise in the environment is canceled by producing anti-noise signals near the human ears (e.g., in Bose’s noise cancellation headphones). This paper brings IoT to active noise cancellation by combining wireless communication with acoustics.
WalkCompass is a system that exploits smartphone sensors to estimate the direction in which a user is walking. This work provides a crcuial building block for infrastructre less indoor localization. WalkCompass develops a stable technique to estimate the user’s walking direction within a few steps.
Outstanding MS thesis award
CPS Rising Stars 2024
Nakul, the final year Ph.D. student at iCoSMoS, has been selected as one of the CPS Rising Stars, 2024
Best poster award, MobiSys 2023
Sirius, a solution for ultra-low-power self-localization on resource constrained devices, wins best poster award at MobiSys 2023.
Best paper award, MobiSys 2022
SPiDR, an ultra-low-power spatial sensing system for miniature mobile robots, wins best paper award at MobiSys 2022.
Best demo award, MobiSys 2021
Owlet, the low-power and miniaturized spatial sensing system, wins best demo award at MobiSys 2021.
Best poster runner-up award, SenSys 2020
LidarPhone wins best poster runner-up award at SenSys 2020. LidarPhone shows how the lidar sensor can be exploited to extract traces of spoken words and uncovers an acoustic eavesdropping threat.
CSL Ph.D. Thesis Award, 2019
The thesis “Inaudible Acoustics: Techniques and Applications” wins the CSL Ph.D. thesis award 2019 at UIUC.
Best paper award at MobiSys, 2017
“BackDoor: Making Microphones Hear Inaudible Sounds” wins the best paper award and the audience-choice award at MobiSys 2017.
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QInF) finalist, 2016
“The QInF program is focused on recognizing, rewarding, and mentoring innovative PhD students across a broad range of technical research areas, based on Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and teamwork.”
Bahl fellowship as outstanding graduate student, 2015-2017
“The fellowship was established by Dr. Lalit R. Bahl and Kavita Kinra and will provide graduate fellowships to students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, UIUC”
Valkenburg award for outstanding research, 2015
“Mac Van Valkenburg symbolizes the highest quality of engineering education in Illinois and, indeed, in the country. The award, which is given annually to one or two outstanding PhD candidates in ECE, UIUC.”
Outstanding thesis award for MS thesis, 2013
The MS thesis was selected for the outstanding thesis award 2013 at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.
NSDI 2025
Large Network UWB Localization: Algorithms and Implementation
Nakul Garg (UMD), Irtaza Shahid(UMD), Ramanujan K Sheshadri (NEC Labs), Karthik Sundaresan (GATech), Nirupam Roy (UMD)
ICASSP 2024
Learning Speaker-Listener Mutual Head Orientations by Leveraging HRTF and Voice Directivity on Headphones
Harshvardhan Takawale, Nirupam Roy
arXiv 2024
IMUOptimize: A Data-Driven Approach to Optimal IMU Placement for Human Pose Estimation with Transformer Architecture
Varun Ramani, Hossein Khayami, Yang Bai, Nakul Garg, Nirupam Roy
UbiComp/IMWUT 2024
Scribe: Simultaneous Voice and Handwriting Interface
Yang Bai, Irtaza Shahid, Harshvardhan Takawale, Nirupam Roy
GetMobile 2024
Microstructure-Assisted Vision: Adding New Senses to Low-Power Devices
Yang Bai, Nakul Garg, Nirupam Roy
SIGMOBILE research highlights
MobiSys 2023
Sirius: A Self-Localization System for Resource-Constrained IoT Sensors
Nakul Garg, Nirupam Roy
Best poster award
MobiSys 2023
“Is this my president speaking?” Tamper-proofing Speech in Live Recordings
Irtaza Shahid, Nirupam Roy
HotMobile 2023
ThermWare: Toward Side-channel Defense for Tiny IoT Devices
Nakul Garg, Irtaza Shahid, Erin Avllazagaj, Jennie Hill, Jun Han, Nirupam Roy
IASA 2023
Structure Assisted Spectrum Sensing for Low-power Acoustic Event Detection
Nakul Garg, Harshvardhan Takawale, Yang Bai, Irtaza Shahid, Nirupam Roy
MobiSys 2022
SPiDR: Ultra-low-power Acoustic Spatial Sensing for Micro-robot Navigation
Yang Bai (co-primary), Nakul Garg (co-primary), Nirupam Roy
Best paper award
IASA 2022
VoiceFind: Noise-Resilient Speech Recovery in Commodity Headphones
Irtaza Shahid, Yang Bai, Nakul Garg, Nirupam Roy
AVAR 2022
Personal active soundfield control (PASCAL) framework
Shoken Kaneko, Irtaza Shahid, Nirupam Roy, Nail Gumerov, Ramani Duraiswami
MobiSys 2021
Owlet: enabling spatial information in ubiquitous acoustic devices
Nakul Garg (co-primary), Yang Bai (co-primary), Nirupam Roy
Best demo award
SenSys 2020
Spying with Your Robot Vacuum Cleaner: Eavesdropping via Lidar Sensors
Sriram Sami, Yimin Dai, Sean Rui Xiang Tan, Nirupam Roy, Jun Han
Best poster runner-up award
Ph.D. Dissertation
Inaudible Acoustics: Techniques and Applications
Nirupam Roy
CSL Ph.D. thesis award, UIUC
SIGCOMM 2018
MUTE: Bringing IoT to Noise Cancellation
Sheng Shen, Nirupam Roy, Junfeng Guan, Haitham Hassanieh, Romit Roy Choudhury
NSDI 2018
Inaudible Voice Commands: The Long-Range Attack and Defense
Nirupam Roy, Sheng Shen, Haitham Hassanieh, Romit Roy Choudhury
MobiSys 2017
BackDoor: Making Microphones Hear Inaudible Sounds
Nirupam Roy, Haitham Hassanieh, Romit Roy Choudhury
Best paper award Audience choice award
NSDI 2016
Ripple II: Faster Communication through Physical Vibration
Nirupam Roy, Romit Roy Choudhury
ICNP 2016
Compressing Backoff in CSMA Networks
Mahanth K Gowda, Nirupam Roy, Romit Roy Choudhury, Srihari Nelakuditi
NSDI 2015
Ripple: Communicating through Physical Vibrations
Nirupam Roy, Mahanth K Gowda, Romit Roy Choudhury
MobiSys 2014
I am a Smartphone and I can Tell my User’s Walking Direction
Nirupam Roy, He Wang, Romit Roy Choudhury
Outstanding MS thesis award
NDSS 2014
AccelPrint: Imperfections of Accelerometers Make Smartphones Trackable
Nirupam Roy, S. Dey (Co-primary), W. Xu, R. Roy Choudhury, S. Nelakuditi
HotNets 2014
Infrastructure Mobility: A What-if Analysis
Mahanth K Gowda, Nirupam Roy, Romit Roy Choudhury
HotWireless 2014
Backing out of Linear Backoff in Wireless Networks
Mahanth K Gowda, Nirupam Roy, Romit Roy Choudhury, Srihari Nelakuditi
MobiSys 2023
Poster: Ultra-low-power Angle-of-Arrival Estimation Using a Single Antenna
Nakul Garg, Nirupam Roy
Best poster award
HotMobile 2023
Poster: Bringing AR/VR to Everyday Life - A Wireless Localization perspective
Nakul Garg, Irtaza Shahid, Karthik Sankar, Mallesham Dasari, Ramanujan Sheshadri, Karthikeyan Sundaresan, Nirupam Roy
HotMobile 2023
Poster: Natural Voice Interface for the Next Generation of Smart Spaces
Yang Bai, Nakul Garg, Harshvardhan Takawale, Anupam Das, Nirupam Roy
MobiSys 2022
Poster: Ultra-low-power Acoustic Imaging
Yang Bai (co-primary), Nakul Garg (co-primary), Nirupam Roy
MobiSys 2021
Demo: Microstructure-guided Spatial Sensing for Low-power IoT
Nakul Garg (co-primary), Yang Bai (co-primary), Nirupam Roy
Best demo award
HotMobile 2020
Poster: Acoustic Sensing for Detecting Projectile Attacks on Small Drones
Nakul Garg, Nirupam Roy
SenSys 2020
Poster: LidarPhone: Acoustic Eavesdropping using a Lidar Sensor
Sriram Sami, Sean Rui Xiang Tan, Yimin Dai, Nirupam Roy, Jun Han
Best poster runner-up award
MobiCom 2018
Poster: Networked Acoustics Around Human Ears
Sheng Shen, Nirupam Roy, Junfeg Guan, Haitham Hassanieh, Romit Roy Choudhury
MobiSys 2017
Demo: Riding the Non-linearities to Record Ultrasound with Smartphones
Nirupam Roy, Haitham Hassanieh, Romit Roy Choudhury
MobiCom 2016
Assessing Header Impacts in Soccer with Smartball
Theodore Stone et. al., Mentor: Nirupam Roy
Student research competition winner
Google 2015
Ripple: Communicating through Physical Vibration
Nirupam Roy, Romit Roy Choudhury
Google Mobile Faculty Summit 2015
MobiSys 2014
Demo: I am a Smartphone and I can Tell my User’s Walking Direction
Nirupam Roy, He Wang, Romit Roy Choudhury
Pending
Audio control system
Ramani Duraiswami, Shoken Eckhart Kaneko, Nail A. Gumerov, Nirupam Roy
Patent number: US 20220377461 A1, Nov 24, 2022
Granted
Causing a voice enabled device to defend against inaudible signal attacks
Nirupam Roy, Romit Roy Choudhury, Haitham Al Hassanieh
Patent number: US 11264047 B2, March 1, 2022
Granted
Vibrational devices as sound sensors
Romit Roy Choudhury, Nirupam Roy
Patent number: US 10628484 B2, April 21, 2020
Granted
Unsupervised indoor localization and heading directions estimation
Romit Roy Choudhury, He Wang, Nirupam Roy, S. Sen, M. Youssef, A. Elgohary, M. Farid
Patent number: US 9730029 B2, Aug 8, 2017
AccelPrint
BackDoor
VibraPhone
LipRead
MUTE
Nirupam Roy
Nakul Garg
Yang Bai
Irtaza Shahid
Harshvardhan Takawale
Aritrik Ghosh
Ayushi Mishra
Sumbul Zehra
Justin Goodman
Jason Okorie
Robert Estan
Priyadarshan Narayanasamy
Shanmuka Sadhu
Jennie Hill
Erin Avllazagaj
Allen Leis