Abu Bakar

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Josiah Hester. I am a systems researcher who leverages battery-free computing to build sustainable and intelligent ubiquitous computing systems.

My research approach involves a comprehensive exploration of the entire battery-free system stack. I design hardware platforms that enable energy-efficient batteryless operation, develop operating systems that reliably execute programs under frequent power failures, devise embedded machine learning algorithms that work efficiently on resource-constrained hardware, and create tools to facilitate the application development process for makers and researchers. I leverage these systems to build health-sensing wearables and infrastructure-monitoring devices, and actively seek opportunities to apply them in user-interaction, accessibility, and environment-monitoring applications, with a primary focus on minimizing environmental impact.

I was named a Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Rising Star in 2022.

Prior to joining Georgia Tech, I completed my Masters in Computer Science from Northwestern University, and Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Pakistan.

Media Coverage: Forbes, Washington Post, Scientific American, The Hill, Daily Mail, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, Mashable, Slash Gear, ACM Tech News , The Independent, TechXplore , Interesting Engineering, Hackster.io.

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News

12-2023

I have passed my PhD proposal!

11-2023

Results of our user study on designing batteryless wearables are published in IJHCI.

11-2023

Received Best PhD Forum Presentation Award at SenSys 2023!

11-2023

Presenting my thesis titled "Adaptive and Intelligent Battery-free Computing Systems" at SenSys 2023 PhD Forum.

05-2023

I will be joining Future Technologies Group at Accenture for summer internship.

03-2023

Protean is invited for research highlight in SIGMOBILE's GetMobile magazine.

11-2022

Presented Protean and Lite-TM at ACM SenSys 2022 in Boston.

09-2022

Two first-author papers on adaptive battery-free intermittent computing accepted to ACM SenSys 2022!

09-2022

FaceBit, our smart face mask platform is named a Finalist in Fast Company's 2022 Innovation by Design Awards in the Students category!

09-2022

Transferred to GaTech from Northwestern University. Continuing PhD in the School of Interactive Computing.

04-2022

Selected as a CPS Rising Star!

01-2022

FaceBit, our smart face mask platform was featured in Forbes, Washington Post, Scientific American, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, Mashable, and many others!

12-2021

Paper on logic-based intelligence for batteryless sensors accepted to Hotmobile 2022!

11-2021

Paper on smart face masks accepted to ACM IMWUT 2022!

09-2021

BFree, a novice-friendly system for battery-free sensor prototyping with Python was featured in The Independent, TechXplore , Interesting Engineering, Hackster.io!

07-2021

Paper on an intermittent adaptation platform accepted to ACM IMWUT 2021!

01-2021

Accepted an offer to join Nokia Bell Labs' Pervasive Computing Group for internship in Fall 2021.

12-2020

Paper on battery-free sensor prototyping with python accepted to ACM IMWUT 2021!

03-2020

Paper on an energy analysis tool for transiently powered computers accepted to ACM TECS 2020!

02-2020

Received SIG travel grant to attend ASPLOS 2020!

11-2019

Paper on a low-overhead and time-sensitive intermittent computing system accepted to ASPLOS 2020!

04-2019

EPIC, an energy profiling tool for intermittently powered systems accepted to LCTES 2019!

11-2018

Received NSF travel grant to attend SenSys 2018!

09-2018

Paper on analyzing energy harvesting modes for intermittent adaptation accepted to ENSsys 2018!

11-2018

Paper on energy-efficient air conditioning in older buildings accepted to ACM TOSN 2018!

09-2018

Started grad school in EECS department at Northwestern University!

11-2017

Hawadaar, our distributed air conditioning system received People's Choice Award at BuildSys 2017!

08-2017

Paper on an inverted HVAC system accepted to BuildSys 2017!


Awards

2023

Best PhD Forum Presentation Award at SenSys 2023

2023

ACM SIGMOBILE research highlight for "Protean: An Energy-Efficient and Heterogeneous Platform..." in GetMobile 2023

2022

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Rising Star by University of Virginia

2022

ACM SIGMOBILE research highlight for "REHASH: A Flexible, Developer Focused, Heuristic Adaptation..." in GetMobile 2022

2020

ACM SIG travel grant to attend ASPLOS 2020

2018

NSF travel grant to attend ACM SenSys 2018

2017

People's Choice Award for Inverted HVAC at ACM BuildSys 2017

2017

ACM SIGMOBILE travel grant to attend ACM BuildSys 2017

2016

Dean's honor list for five semesters at NUCES

2016

Silver and bronze medals for three semesters at NUCES

2014

Best Intern Award at SysNet Lab


Publications

Protean: An Energy-Efficient and Heterogeneous Platform for Adaptive and Hardware-Accelerated Battery-free Computing

Abu Bakar, Rishabh Goel, Jasper de Winkel, Jason Huang, Saad Ahmed, Bashima Islam, Przemysław Pawełczak, Kasım Sinan Yıldırım, Josiah Hester

ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys'22)

Protean is an inference-capable battery-free platform designed for energy-aware run-time scalability. It consists of three main components: 1) SuperSensor, a modular plug-and-play platform that provides hardware support for intermittent computing with a reconfigurable energy storage circuit, a 32-bit ARM-based microcontroller with a convolutional neural network accelerator, etc, 2) Chameleon, an energy-aware adaptive runtime that provides intermittency-proof execution of machine learning tasks across heterogeneous processing elements, and 3)Metamorph, a code generator tool that automates the conversion of ML models to intermittent safe programs.

SIGMOBILE GetMobile Research Highlight 2023


Adaptive Intelligence for Batteryless Sensors Using Software-Accelerated Tsetlin Machines

Abu Bakar, Tousif Rahman, Rishad Shafik, Fahim Kawsar, Alessandro Montanari

ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys'22)

In this work, we propose Lite-TM, a framework that addresses the shortcomings of the Tsetlin Machines (TM) and makes them an energy-efficient inference engine for batteryless sensors. We exploit the inherent redundancies observed in the TM architecture and trained TM models with two novel compression techniques, respectively, that reduce the model size by 99%. These techniques significantly reduce the memory footprint and speed up the run-time execution by dynamically scaling the computational complexity based on available energy.


Logic-based Intelligence for Batteryless Sensors

Abu Bakar, Tousif Rahman, Alessandro Montanari, Jie Lei, Rishad Shafik, Fahim Kawsar

International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile'22)

In this work, we explore a logic-based inference algorithm, Tsetlin Machine (TM), for making batteryless sensors intelligent. Because of constrained memory, energy and compute resources, using TM models as is in real-world applications is not possible. We propose a lossless compression scheme based on run-length encoding and show that it can compress the model by up to 99%. This translates into a lower memory footprint and better energy efficiency (up to 4.9x) compared to the original Tsetlin Machine algorithm, and provides promising trade offs when compared against state-of-the-art binary neural networks.


FaceBit: Smart Face Masks Platform

Alex Curtiss, Blaine Rothrock, Abu Bakar, Nivedita Arora, Jason Huang, Zachary Englhardt, Aaron-Patrick Empedrado, Chixiang Wang, Saad Ahmed, Yang Zhang, Nabil Alshurafa, Josiah Hester

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/UbiComp'22)

FaceBit is an unobtrusive, intelligent platform that sticks with masks and collects various physiological signals. It monitors heart rate without skin contact via ballistocardiography, respiration rate via temperature changes, and mask-fit and wear-time from pressure signals, all on-device with an energy-efficient runtime system. It’s basically a FitBit for your face! FaceBit can harvest energy from breathing, motion, or sunlight to supplement its tiny primary cell battery that alone delivers a battery lifetime of 11 days or more.

Fast Company 2022 Innovation by Design Award—Finalist in the Students category


REHASH: A Flexible, Developer Focused, Heuristic Adaptation Platform for Intermittently Powered Computing

Abu Bakar, Alexander G. Ross, Kasım Sinan Yıldırım, Josiah Hester

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/UbiComp'21)

REHASH is the first energy-aware adaptive runtime system for battery-free systems. It uses novel lightweight signals stemming from the intermittent execution of programs and combines them in simple heuristic functions to predict energy availability which helps applications dynamically adjust their complexity at run-time. A simulation tool, REHASH-explorer, helps developers choose from the proposed signals and design heuristic functions that best suit their application needs.

SIGMOBILE GetMobile Research Highlight 2022


BFree: Enabling Battery-free Sensor Prototyping with Python

Vito Kortbeek, Abu Bakar, Stefany Cruz, Kasım Sinan Yıldırım, Przemysław Pawełczak, Josiah Hester

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/UbiComp'21)

BFree allows the development of battery-free applications, to novices and hobbyists, using the Python (leveraging AdaFruit’s CircuitPython ecosystem) programming language and widely available hobbyist maker platforms. BFree provides energy harvesting hardware and a power failure resilient version of Python, with durable libraries that enable common coding practice and off-the-shelf sensors. This work allows makers to engage with a useful, long-term, and environmentally responsible future of ubiquitous computing.


Time-sensitive Intermittent Computing Meets Legacy Software

Vito Kortbeek, Kasım Sinan Yıldırım, Abu Bakar, Jacob Sorber, Przemysław Pawełczak, Josiah Hester

International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'20)

TICS is a checkpoint-based runtime system for battery-free intermittently-powered devices that guarantees forward progress, data consistency, and correctness. TICS provides simple programming abstractions for handling the passing of time through intermittent failures, and uses this to make decisions about when data can be used or thrown away. It also provides predictable checkpoint sizes by keeping checkpoint and restore times small, enabling numerous existing embedded applications to run intermittently.


The Betrayal of Constant Power × Time: Finding the Missing Joules of Transiently-powered Computers

Saad Ahmed, Abu Bakar, Naveed Anwar Bhatti, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, Junaid Haroon Siddiqui, Luca Mottola

International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES'19)

EPIC is a compile-time energy analysis tool for transiently-powered systems. It substitutes the assumption of constant power consumption in existing analysis techniques for battery-free systems, with a dynamic power consumption model, giving programmers accurate information on worst-case energy consumption of programs. Using EPIC with existing debugging tools, programmers can avoid unnecessary program changes that hurt energy efficiency .


Inverting HVAC for Energy Efficient Thermal Comfort in Populous Emerging Countries

Khadija Hafeez, Yasra Chandio, Abu Bakar, Ayesha Ali, Affan A. Syed, Tariq M. Jadoon, Muhammad Hamad Alizai

International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys'17)

Emerging countries predominantly rely on room-level air conditioning units (window ACs, space heaters, ceiling fans) for thermal comfort. These distributed units have manual, decentralized control leading to suboptimal energy usage for two reasons: excessive setpoints by individuals, and inability to interleave different conditioning units for maximal energy saving. In this work, we made Hawadaar, a novel inverted HVAC approach that cheaply retrofits these distributed units with centralized "on-off" control. With 20% market penetration, Hawadaar can save up to 6% of electricity per capita in residential and commercial sectors.

People's Choice Award


Design of a Laser Tracker Using 2-DOF Stepper Controlled Platform

Abu Bakar, Neelam Nasir, Mukhtar Ullah, Zeashan Hameed Khan

International Conference on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (ICRAI'16)

In this work, we propose a novel approach to track a moving object using an infrared laser mounted on a 2 degree of freedom (DOF) stepper-controlled platform. The proposed approach can achieve a wide range of tracking distance with precision, and therefore finds various applications in navigation, localization and control of autonomous robotic systems. Moreover, this setup can also be used to provide power to a moving object wirelessly while measuring its speed of motion at the same time.


Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of TechnologyAtlanta, GA, USA
Expected May 2024

Thesis: Adaptive and Intelligent Battery-free Computing Systems

Advisor: Dr. Josiah Hester

M.S. in Computer Science
Northwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USA
2020

Advisor: Dr. Josiah Hester

B.S. in Electrical Engineering
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES)Islamabad, Pakistan
2016

Dean's honor list for five semesters


Work Experience

Professional Work
Georgia Institute of TechnologyAtlanta, GA, USA
Graduate Research Assistant
2022 – Present
Accenture — Future Technologies R&D GroupAtlanta, GA, USA
Research Intern
Summer 2023
Northwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USA
Graduate Research Assistant
2018 – 2022
Nokia Bell Labs — Pervasive Computing GroupCambridge, UK
Research Intern
Fall 2021
LUMS School of Science and EngineeringLahore, Pakistan
Research Assistant
2016 – 2018
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences — SysNet LabIslamabad, Pakistan
Undergraduate Research Intern
Summer 2014

Best Intern Award

Teaching
Georgia Institute of TechnologyAtlanta, GA, USA
Teaching Assistant — C7470 Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
Spring 2023
Northwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USA
Co-Instructor — CE465 Internet-of-things Sensors, Systems, and Applications
Spring 2022

Teaching Assistant — CE346 Microprocessor System Design
Spring 2021

Teaching Assistant — CE346 Microprocessor System Design
Spring 2020
Information Technology UniversityLahore, Pakistan
Teaching Assistant — CS365 Data Communication & Networks
Spring 2017
LUMS School of Science and EngineeringLahore, Pakistan
Teaching Assistant — CS677 Internet of Things
Fall 2016
National University of Computer and Emerging SciencesIslamabad, Pakistan
Teaching Assistant — CS214 Programming Fundamentals
Fall 2015

Teaching Assistant — EE112 Programming for Engineers-II
Fall 2014

Teaching Assistant — EE110: Programming for Engineers-I
Spring 2014
Leadership Roles
Toastmasters International — Northwestern University ClubEvanston, IL, USA
Treasurer
2019 - 2020
Graduate Student Seminars — Northwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USA
Organizer
2019
National Solutions Convention (NaSCon) — NUCESIslamabad, Pakistan
Finance Secretary
2016
IEEE Student Branch — NUCESIslamabad, Pakistan
Chairperson
2015 - 2016
IEEE FAST Electrica — NUCESIslamabad, Pakistan
President
2015
IEEE Robotics Club — NUCESIslamabad, Pakistan
President
2015
Mentorship
Graduate Students
Mentor

2021 – Present Rishabh Goel, Ph.D. Robotics, Georgia Institute of Technology

2023 Sabeen Liaquat, M.S. Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology (Now Software Engineer at Amazon)

2023 Rayan Dabbagh, M.S. Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology (Now Software Engineer at Amazon)

2023 Srihari Subramanian, M.S. Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

2023 Rahul Katre, M.S. Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

2023 Ryan Tougas, M.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

2023 Vivek Kumar Singh, M.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

2022 – 2023 Julia Persche, M.S. Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University (Now Product Designer at Cionic)

2020 – 2021 Alexander Ross, M.S. Electrical Engineering, Northwestern University (Now Research Assoc. at MunichImaging)

2020 – 2021 Eugene Choe, B.S./M.S. Computer Engineering, Northwestern University (Now Firmware Engineer at Samsung)

2019 – 2020 Julian Richey, B.S./M.S. Computer Engineering, Northwestern University (Now ASIC Design Engineer at Amazon)

2019 – 2020 Jackson Schuster, B.S./M.S. Computer Engineering, Northwestern University (Now Software Engineer at Microsoft)

Undergraduate Students
Mentor

2021 – 2023 Jason Huang, B.S. Computer Engineering, Northwestern University

2023 Aaron Wu, B.S. Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

2022 Alejandra Almonte, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University