Akarsh Prabhakara comes to Madison from his PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon University. In his research, Prabhakara is working on wire-free, non-invasive health monitoring to reduce patients’ discomfort at healthcare facilities. He hopes to teach his students to “elegantly answer the whys and hows of each idea/topic” in his courses. And he wants to see if he can bike at high speeds, using the wind to assist him. Read more below!
Hometown:
I grew up in Bangalore, India. Back then it used to be a lot more greener and known for being a pensioner’s paradise. Despite the population boom in the city today, I still find the remaining greenery very peaceful.
Educational/professional background:
After my schooling in Bangalore, I went to a beach town (Surathkal) for undergrad. This was at National Institute of Technology Karnataka. It is sandwiched between the Arabian Sea on one side and the Western Ghats, dense rainforests, on the other. From there, I went to Carnegie Mellon for my PhD. Pittsburgh’s greenery and light fall rain was very reminiscent of Surathkal. Over time, Pittsburgh’s hills and river trails made me fall in love with the city.
How did you get into your field of research?
It was by total chance. I was interested in signals during the early years of undergrad and wanted to build real world systems handling signals of various kinds. When I started my PhD, I came across very interesting problems from my advisors for which using wireless signals was a candidate option. Thus, wireless signals + real world systems = wireless systems + cyber-physical systems.
What are your areas of focus?
My areas of focus are wireless (perception and communication) systems and cyber-physical systems. I enjoy building cool sensing systems of all sorts.
We like to share the work of our faculty far and wide and make it accessible to all audiences. Please tell us about something you’re working on in layperson’s terms, so that non-computer scientists at UW-Madison and the general public can understand what you’re passionate about.
My research has developed high-resolution radio frequency imaging systems—a camera replacement for scenarios that demand occlusion-penetrating sensing. For example, for reliable perception in autonomous driving (through fog, snow, rain), agriculture (through dust), and robotics in harsh environments (through smoke). As nasty as they can be for vison systems, the above mentioned occlusions are commonplace and are an important problem to address. Radio frequencies possess the cool capability of penetrating through many of these blockers and offer an option to build competing imaging systems. However, such systems typically tend to be large and bulky. A key advantage with my approach is that I achieve the high quality with just portable and compact sensing platforms that can be easily embedded in many of our machines, be that a phone or small scale drone. Beyond these applications, many other visual occluders are worth noting as challenging problems: sensing inside deep body tissue, food quality inspection inside packaging material such as cardboard boxes, etc. By building intelligent compact radio sensors, I aim to see through occlusions in novel scenarios and deliver new capabilities.
What main issue do you address or problem do you seek to solve in your work?
One vision that I am passionate about is wire-free, non-invasive health monitoring at home, at a care giving facility, or at a hospital. Imagine a situation around a hospital bed, which typically has lots of probes and wires going from a subject’s body hooked to various machines. Can each of these sensor measurements be done wirelessly in a non-contact way while the subject is comfortably resting? This would drastically reduce the discomfort one experiences at such facilities. I hope to lead research that addresses several missing pieces to make this vision a reality.
What’s one thing you hope students who take a class with you will come away with?
I believe in classes that enable critical thinking across different ideas. I hope students can not only excel in pinpoint questions during exams but also elegantly answer the whys and hows of each idea/topic—what was the need, whether that approach was the right choice, tradeoffs, etc.
What attracted you to UW-Madison?
UW-Madison is a top school with a very strong computer systems group. Being here at a large public school gives me a chance to talk to diverse departments and collaborate on interdisciplinary topics.
What was your first visit to campus like?
My first visit was during my faculty candidate interview. I remember enjoying the cheese curds at Steenbock’s. All the faculty were super friendly. I remember some of them had taken extra effort to go over the miscellaneous sections on my webpage to chat about things outside my research that interests me.
What are you looking forward to doing or experiencing in Madison?
I would like to pick up cross-country skiing, figure skating, and I have heard it gets extremely windy here, so I want to see if I can bike at high speeds—maybe even up to 100 kmph (about 62 mph) wind assisted.
Do you feel your work relates in any way to the Wisconsin Idea? If so, please describe how.
The Wisconsin Idea goes fully hand-in-hand with my aspirations and ethos as an academic. I am a systems researcher that works across the stack, all the way from building fundamental technologies to tying them to real world applications. The domains and problems that I have mentioned—transportation, food and agriculture, socially useful autonomous systems, and healthcare—all push the society towards better prosperity at all levels, including city, state, national, and global. For example, one of the systems that I have built is to equip firefighting first responders who play an immensely crucial role in the society to handle extremely dense, smoky situations gracefully. In fact, I am generally inspired by geographically local challenges and opportunities. I am looking forward to engaging with local communities and understanding problems from ground zero. Beyond research contributions to the society, in my capacity as a teacher and mentor, I aim to empower my students to emerge as global leaders in their respective fields and amplify the societal impact.