Imagine a future where intelligence could be seamlessly integrated into our physical environment, operating autonomously for years on harvested energy. However, realizing this vision faces fundamental challenges in overcoming physics bottlenecks of miniaturized sensing, scaling intelligence across large deployments, and doing so in a sustainable way. This thesis presents research in reimagining computing from first principles to enable sustainable ambient intelligence at an entirely new level of granularity. First, we demonstrate how reframing spatial sensing as a learning problem enables detail perception at a fraction of resources - from sound-localization in centimeter-scale devices to depth perception for insect-scale robots using metamaterial-based frontends. Then, we present a real-time battery-free localization system that achieves GPS-like accuracy while consuming thousands of times less power, capable of tracking millions of micro-assets across cities by leveraging non-linearity and next-G cellular infrastructure. The thesis concludes with a glimpse of ongoing and future projects exploring spatial intelligence in LLMs and digital twins for healthcare.
Nakul Garg is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests lie at the intersection of ambient intelligence, wireless sensing, cyber-physical systems, and embedded AI. His research has appeared in leading conferences including NSDI, MobiSys, and SenSys. His contributions have been recognized with the MobiSys 2022 Best Paper Award and several best demo and poster awards. His work has been selected as research highlights in the Communications of the ACM and SIGMOBILE. He is a recipient of the University of Maryland's Dissertation Fellowship and Future Faculty Fellowship and has been named a CPS Rising Star. In recognition of his research impact, he has received the Marconi Young Scholar award 2024.