Ananta Narayanan Balaji
I am a Research Scientist in the Pervasive Systems Department at Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge and part of the Device Forms team. My research focuses on developing cutting-edge, energy-efficient, and practical wearable sensing and computing solutions, paving the way for the next generation of wearable technology. Some topics we explore include (but are not limited to) Health sensing, Earable computing, Low power on-device ML, and Batteryless sensing.
I finished my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore under the supervision of Professor Li-Shiuan Peh. My PhD focused on real-time, low-power sensing solutions and platform optimizations for next-gen wearables. My Ph.D. thesis was nominated for the ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award from National University of Singapore. Before joining NUS, I completed my Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Thiagarajar College of Engineering, India, and the National University of Singapore.
I take a systems builder approach to research, focusing on building end-to-end hardware and software systems. During the past few years, My research has focused on advancing wearables in two main areas: (a) Novel health monitoring applications utilizing data from existing sensors in prevalent wearable platforms like Smartwatches and Earables, and (b) Efficient platform optimizations for emerging wearable devices, encompassing smart textiles and AR glasses.
Publications
Internships
Low power and minimal calibration solution for in-ear sensing in hearables.
Exploration into in-ear PPG signals for robust vital sign sensing with future hearables and how blood pressure sensing can be achieved in future hearables.
Low power and Low compute interaction input methods/techniques for future Augmented Reality
Backend development for predicting routes and arrival times in Marine logistics
Noise Filtering and UAV tracking with neuromorphic cameras (ATIS camera)
Deep Learning based sentence classification for chatbots
Devlopment of a Natural Language based question answering system
Work Experience
Automatic form filling and table identification for payment invoices, sales spreadsheets, resume etc.
Academic Service
Paper Reviewer: ACM IMWUT
Paper Reviewer: ACM IMWUT, CHI, TEI, DIS, Ubicomp/ISWC, EICS
Paper Reviewer: ACM IMWUT, CSCW, Transactions on Computers(TC), CHI, TEI, Ubicomp/ISWC, MobileHCI
Paper Reviewer: ACM IMWUT, CHI, TEI, DIS, MobileHCI, World Haptics Symposium, ISMAR
Programme Committee Member: EICS 2023 Late breaking work, Mobisys 2023 Atrifcat evaluation