Faculty DirectoryNivedita Arora
Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Junior Professor of Design
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Contact
2145 Sheridan RoadTech L477
Evanston, IL 60208-3109
Email Nivedita Arora
Website
Departments
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Affiliations
Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy
Education
PhD in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
MS in Human-Computer Interaction, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
BS in Information Technology, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, DU, India
Research Interests
Prof. Arora’s research aims to transform sustainable everyday materials and things (paper, wood, soil, plants, textiles) to have computational properties and support applications in climate change, agriculture, smart infrastructure, wildlife monitoring, and education. She calls this new area of research — ‘Sustainable Computational Materials.’ She directs the VAK Sustainable Computing Lab, where her research envisions creating ubiquitous computing devices with a sustainability-first approach for their entire lifecycle. Her lab works at the intersection of computer systems, machine learning, materials, chemistry, and biology. She also actively applies my work to application domains like smart home control, agriculture, health, biodiversity, and urban infrastructure monitoring.
Significant Recognition
- People of ACM, 2024
- ACM Dissertation Award, 2023
- Outstanding Dissertation Award, Georgia Tech College of Computing, 2023
- ACM Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Ubiquitous Computing Student Award, 2021
- Georgia Tech Foley Scholar, 2021
- Distinguished Paper, ACM Ubicomp Conference, 2020
Selected Publications
Nivedita Arora, Prem Kumar. "Sustainable Quantum Computing: Opportunities and Challenges of Benchmarking Carbon in the Quantum Computing Lifecycle." Communications of the ACM 2025 (to appear)
Soil-Powered Computing: The Engineer's Guide to Practical Soil Microbial Fuel Cell Design. In Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Volume 7, Issue 4 (2024) https://www.terracell.org/
Do, Youngwook, Nivedita Arora, Ali Mirzazadeh, Injoo Moon, Eryue Xu, Zhihan Zhang, Gregory D. Abowd, and Sauvik Das. "Powering for Privacy: Improving User Trust in Smart Speaker Microphones with Intentional Powering and Perceptible Assurance." In 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (2023)
Nivedita Arora, Vikram Iyer, Hyunjoo Oh, Gregory D. Abowd, and Josiah D. Hester. "Circularity in Energy Harvesting Computational" Things"." In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (2022) [Best Position Paper video]
Nivedita Arora, Ali Mirzazadeh, Injoo Moon, Charles Ramey, Yuhui Zhao, Daniela C. Rodriguez, Gregory D. Abowd, and Thad Starner. "MARS: Nano-power battery-free wireless interfaces for touch, swipe and speech input." In The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 1305-1325. 2021. [Fast Company Design Competition Finalist video]
Alexander Curtiss, Blaine Rothrock, Abu Bakar, Nivedita Arora, Jason Huang, Zachary Englhardt, Aaron-Patrick Empedrado et al. "FaceBit: Smart face masks platform." Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (2021) [video]
Nivedita Arora, Thad Starner, and Gregory D. Abowd. "SATURN: An introduction to the Internet of Materials." Communications of the ACM (2020) [Research Highlights CACM, SIGMOBILE]
Arora, Nivedita, Steven L. Zhang, Fereshteh Shahmiri, Diego Osorio, Yi-Cheng Wang, Mohit Gupta, Zhengjun Wang, Thad Starner, Zhong Lin Wang, and Gregory D. Abowd. "SATURN: A thin and flexible self-powered microphone leveraging triboelectric nanogenerator." Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (2018) [Distinguished paper top 3% video]
Patents
Arora, Nivedita, Gregory D. Abowd, Mohit Gupta, Diego Osorio, Seyedeh Fereshteh Shahmiri, Thad Eugene Starner, Yi-Cheng Wang et al. "Thin and flexible self-powered vibration transducer employing triboelectric nanogeneration." U.S. Patent 10,932,063, issued February 23, 2021.