Keynote

Karthikeyan (Karthik) Sundaresan, Georgia Institute of Technology

Title: Collaborative Positioning: From Theory To Practice

Abstract: Wireless positioning has been the poster child for wireless sensing for a long time. Its ubiquitous need in GPS-denied environments has led to its prominence and native support in our popular wireless communication systems, 5G cellular and WiFi today through the inclusion of dedicated features (e.g. 5G positioning reference signals, WiFi fine time measurements). Yet, today’s approaches still rely on conventional infrastructure-based positioning that imposes a large overhead on communication and onerous requirements on infrastructure access. In this talk, we will propose an alternate ‘collaborative’ positioning paradigm that ofloads the burden of positioning from the infrastructure to peer mobile devices, while being communication-aware, standards-compliant and mobility-resilient. Through novel, first-of-its-kind `integrated positioning and communication’ systems we aim to enable compelling 5G-native applications in 3D indoor positioning. We will shed light on how we go from analytical, communication-aware collaborative positioning frameworks to practical, real-world systems and solutions through the lens of three state-of-the-art wireless technologies, namely ultra-wideband (UWB), WiFi and 5G NR.

Bio: Karthikeyan (Karthik) Sundaresan is a Professor in the School of ECE, Georgia Tech. His research interests are broadly in wireless networking and mobile computing, and span both algorithm design as well as system prototyping. He is the recipient of ACM Sigmobile’s Rockstar award (2016) for early career contributions to mobile computing and wireless networking, as well as several best paper awards at prestigious ACM and IEEE conferences. He holds over sixty patents, and received business contribution awards for bringing research technology to commercialization in industry at NEC. He also led the spin-out efforts of two innovative, lab-grown research technologies for infrastructure-free tracking of first responders in GPS-denied environments and sustainable, massive scale product tracking in supply chains. He has participated in various organizational and editorial roles for IEEE and ACM conferences and journals, and served as the PC co-chair for ACM MobiCom’16. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and IEEE, and an ACM distinguished scientist.