Nakul Garg
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
SURF Mentoring
Potential projects/topics: Hands-on projects in sensing and intelligent systems. Students will build simple systems that use sound, radar, or wearable sensors to understand how machines perceive the physical world. Example projects:
- Smart glasses and wearable health sensing: use microphones or motion sensors for continuous health monitoring such as heart or breathing sounds.
- Drones and robots: develop radar sensors to help a drone sense obstacles in low visibility (e.g., smoke or fire in buildings/forests where cameras fail).
- Directional audio (sound zones): create systems where sound from public speakers is heard by only one person in a room.
- Low-power sensing systems: build and test sensing setups that work under tight energy constraints.
Potential skills gained: embedded systems and sensors, robotics and autonomous systems, signal processing, wireless and radar sensing, computer vision, AI and machine learning
Required qualifications:
- Required skills:basic programming helpful but not required
Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I., Graduate Student
Research Areas
Nakul Garg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Nakul's research mission is to enable physical intelligence in everyday objects and environments. His group pioneers new frontiers in wireless and acoustic sensing, developing mobile systems that merge innovations in hardware, signal processing, and machine learning. This approach brings novel sensing, perception, and computational capabilities to applications in robotics, digital health, smart cities, and the Internet of Things.
In recognition of his research impact, Nakul was named a Marconi Young Scholar. His work on micro-watt acoustic imaging for robot navigation received the Best Paper Award at MobiSys 2022. His research has been published in leading conferences, including MobiSys, SenSys, and NSDI, and has been featured as a research highlight in Communications of the ACM (CACM) and ACM GetMobile. Nakul's contributions have also been recognized as an ACM SIGMOBILE Research Highlight of the Year, a CPS Rising Star, and with several best demo and poster awards. He is also a recipient of the University of Maryland's Ann G. Wylie Dissertation and Future Faculty Fellowships.
