Romit Roy Choudhury

2016 Distinguished Academic Achievement Alumni Award

As a faculty member first at Duke University and now at Illinois, Romit Roy Choudhury has made impactful contributions to wireless networking, mobile sensing, and mobile computing technology. Working with sensors embedded in smartphones, wearable devices, and other “things”, he and his students are exploring projects focused on indoor localization, gesture recognition, motion data analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Sensors are like lenses into human lives—they provide timely data about position, activity, and environment, and when fused carefully, can enable new applications. Roy Choudhury’s team has combined sensors with WiFi and computer vision to enable real-time augmented reality, where users can look at their surroundings through smartphones and observe annotation on objects in real time.

In sports-gesture recognition, they infer and track the arm motion of a basketball player only using sensors from the smartwatch. They are also building a radio that communicates between mobile devices through vibrations, an application for merging IoT devices.

In 2015, Roy Choudhury received the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award for significant contributions to mobile sensing and wireless networking with an emphasis on location and cross-layer protocols. Prior to that, he had received a few other awards, including the IBM and Google Faculty Awards, Best Paper Awards, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Hoffner Krippner Innovations in Engineering Award.