Press Highlights: Popular Science, Scientific American, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Independent, The Wall Street Journal, CNET, Communications of the ACM, BBC Newsday, Smithsonian, Guinness Book of World Records, Seeker, ACM Tech News, Mongabay, Crain’s Business.
(07/2024) A successful season complete of manoomin sensor check-ins with Wisconsin tribes.
(06/2024) My former postdoc Nivedita Arora wins the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award!
(01/2024) Dirt powered computing paper published in IMWUT and in the press. (12/2023) We had the honor of hosting Georgia Tech’s President Angel Cabrera in our lab! –>
(10/2023) NSF Grant ($2 million) on carbon nutrition labels for IoT devices with Cornell and Harvard. (09/2023) Our lab is part of a $45 million ARPA-H effort to cut cancer deaths in half! Led by Rice University, with MD Anderson Cancer Center, CMU, Northwestern, and others on the project.
(09/2023) John presented our award winning paper on Interaction Harvesting at ACM UbiComp!
Josiah Hester holds the Allchin Chair and is Associate Professor of Interactive Computing and Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Josiah was previously at Northwestern as an Assistant Professor. He works in intermittent computing and battery-free embedded computing systems. He applies his work to health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for sustainability and conservation, supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, and DARPA. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022. He was named one of Popular Science’s Brilliant Ten, won the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Most Promising Scientist/Engineer Award, and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2021. His work has received six Best Paper type Awards and seven Best Presentation type Awards, and featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC, Popular Science, Communications of the ACM, and the Guinness Book of World Records, among many others.
We hold the vision that the untethered computing devices—wearables, implantables, energy harvesting sensors—hold significant promise for revolutionizing global scale applications across healthcare, environmental stewardship, infrastructure management, and space exploration.
Our research is concerned with the underlying computer systems principles, human factors, and behavioral issues that arise by bringing this vision to reality. We explore and develop radically new hardware designs, software techniques, tools, and programming abstractions so that developers can easily design, debug, and deploy intricate energy aware applications that work in spite of frequent power failures, constrained resources, and unpredictable conditions.
Research Approach: We build fully integrated, end-to-end computer systems to demonstrate the efficacy of the underlying scientific advancement we are concerned with. We run physical experiments to validate our hypothesis on hard benchmarks. We run user studies in the wild to test our sensing technologies, gathering quantitative and qualitative results that inform future work and guard against failures.
Video Info Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Honorable Mention (2x)
Our lab is always looking for highly motivated, extremely curious students, with interesting and diverse backgrounds. After reading some of our papers, and looking at some of our projects, where do you see yourself?
If you are any of these people, we might be interested in working with you as a graduate, or undergraduate student.
Before you contact us, It is highly recommended you read this advice , and this advice. Make sure to apply to Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, and we can talk about working together. If you are already at Georgia Tech as an undergraduate or graduate student, email Prof Hester to schedule a time to talk in his office.
Prof Hester (a Native Hawaiian) is especially interested in engaging Native and Indigenous students and researchers in Computer Science and Engineering. Please reach out.
Fill out this form if you are interested in working with us.
Adaptive, Architecture, hardware, languages, and tools, for energy harvesting, intermittently powered computing devices.
Building sensor networks and edge computing cyberinfrastructure for environmental justice and civic action with Indigenous communities.
Make carbon and sustainability a first-order design parameter for future edge computing devices that range from tiny, energy-harvesting IoT devices to higher performance consumer electronics.
Harnessing energy from soil to compute and sense at scale.
Reinventing robotics platforms with sustainable metrics in mind.
We develop implantable electronics that sense the tumour micro-environment and trigger living call based therapy to treat ovarian cancer.
We develop wearable devices that can sense circadian phase and activity, then deliver interventions (via implantable) to entrain new circadian rythyms.
We explore wearable computational methods to reduce the effect of structural, societal, monetary, or mental barriers to receiving healthcare treatment.
Architecture, languages, and tools, for spintronic computing devices.
Battery-free, interactive devices for a sustainable IoT.
Batteryless devices for smart personal protection
Our lab is generously funded by the National Science Foundation under multiple awards:
We are also funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Office (ARO), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, VMware, and 3M.