Abu Bakar

I am a fourth year PhD student at Northwestern University, and am advised by Josiah Hester at Ka Momoa Lab. I am interested in building battery-free devices and enabling their large scale deployment in daily life applications that include wearables, wildlife tracking, smart buildings and smart cities, for a sustainable future of sensing and computing on these devices. I work on developing new hardware designs, software techniques, and tools so that novice developers and hobbyists can easily design, debug, and deploy sustainable batteryless sensors in dynamic and constrained energy harvesting environments.

News

(Dec 2021) - Paper on logic-based intelligence for batteryless sensors accepted to Hotmobile 2022
(Nov 2021) - Paper on smart face masks accepted to ACM UbiComp 2022
(Sep 2021) - Battery-free sensor prototyping with Python featured in The Independent
(Jul 2021) - Paper on intermittent adaptation accepted to ACM UbiComp 2021
(Jan 2021) - Joining Nokia Bell Labs' Pervasive Computing Group at Cambridge for internship in Fall 2021
(Dec 2020) - Paper on Battery-free Sensor Prototyping with Python accepted to ACM UbiComp 2021
(Mar 2020) - Journal titled Demystifying Energy Consumption Dynamics in Transiently-powered Computers accepted to ACM TECS
(Feb 2020) - Received ACM travel grant to attend ASPLOS 2020
(Nov 2019) - Paper titled Time-sensitive Intermittent Computing Meets Legacy Software accepted to ASPLOS 2020
(Apr 2019) - Paper titled The Betrayal of Constant Power × Time: Finding the Missing Joules of Transiently-Powered Computers accepted to LCTES 2019
(Nov 2018) - Received NSF travel grant to attend SenSys 2018
(Sep 2018) - Paper titled Making Sense of Intermittent Energy Harvesting accepted to ENSsys 2018
(Sep 2018) - Poster titled The Energy Harvesting Mode Abstraction to appear at ACM SenSys 2018
(Jul 2018) - Started grad school in EECS at Northwestern University
(May 2018) - Journal titled Inverted HVAC: Greenifying Older Buildings, One Room at a Time accepted to ACM TOSN
(Nov 2017) - Received People's Choice Award at BuildSys 2017
(Aug 2017) - Paper titled Inverting HVAC for Energy Efficient Thermal Comfort in Populous Emerging Countries accepted to BuildSys 2017

Education

Northwestern University

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Evanston, Illinois, USA

2018 - Current

National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences

B.S. in Electrical Engineering

Islamabad, Pakistan

2012 - 2016

Publications

Conference Papers

Logic-based intelligence for batteryless sensors
Abu Bakar, Tousif Rahman, Alessandro Montanari, Jie Lei, Rishad Shafik, Fahim Kawsar
23rd Annual International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), 2022 - [ Paper ]

FaceBit: Smart Face Masks Platform
Alex Curtiss, Blaine Rothrock, Abu Bakar, N. Arora, J. Huang, Z. Englhardt, A. P. Empedrado, C. Wang, S. Ahmed, Y. Zhang, N. Alshurafa, Josiah Hester
ACM Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), 2022 - [ Paper ]

REHASH: A Flexible, Developer Focused, Heuristic Adaptation Platform for Intermittently Powered Computing
Abu Bakar, Alexander G. Ross, Kasım Sinan Yıldırım, Josiah Hester
ACM Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), 2021 - [ Paper ]

BFree: Enabling Battery-free Sensor Prototyping with Python
Vito Kortbeek, Abu Bakar, Stefany Cruz, Kasim Sinan Yildirim, Przemysław Pawełczak, Josiah Hester
ACM Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), 2021 - [ Paper ] [ Video ]

Time-sensitive Intermittent Computing Meets Legacy Software
Vito Kortbeek, Kasim Yildirim, Abu Bakar, Jacob Sorber, Josiah Hester, Przemysław Pawełczak
25th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2020 - [ Paper ]

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
ACM SIGPLAN / SIGBED 2019 Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES), 2019 - [ Paper ]

Inverting HVAC for Energy Efficient Thermal Comfort in Populous Emerging Countries
Khadija Hafeez, Yasra Noman, Abu Bakar, Ayesha Ali, Affan A. Syed, Tariq M. Jadoon, Muhammad Hamad Alizai
4th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys), 2017 - [ Paper ]

Design of a Laser Tracker Using 2-DOF Stepper Controlled Platform
Abu Bakar, Neelam Nasir, Mukhtar Ullah, Zeashan Hameed Khan
2nd IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (ICRAI), 2016 - [ Paper ]

Workshop Papers

Making Sense of Intermittent Energy Harvesting
Abu Bakar, Josiah Hester
6th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting & Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems (ENSsys), 2018 - [ Paper ]

Journal Papers

Inverted HVAC: Greenifying Older Buildings, One Room at a Time
Samar Abbas, Abu Bakar, Yasra Chandio, Khadija Hafeez, Ayesha Ali, Tariq M. Jadoon, Muhammad Hamad Alizai
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), Volume 14, Issue 3-4, December 2018 - [ Paper ]

Demystifying Energy Consumption Dynamics in Transiently-powered Computers
Saad Ahmed, Muhammad Nawaz, Abu Bakar, Naveed Anwar Bhatti, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, Junaid Haroon Siddiqui, Luca Mottola
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), 2020 - [ Paper ]

Poster Papers

The Energy Harvesting Mode Abstraction
Abu Bakar, Josiah Hester
6th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting & Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems (ENSsys), 2018 - [ Paper ]

Resume

CV