Faculty Directory
Nivedita 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 Road
Tech L477
Evanston, IL 60208-3109

Email Nivedita Arora

Website

VAK Sustainable Computing Lab

Nivedita Arora's Homepage


Departments

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Affiliations

Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy


Download CV

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 envisions creating sustainable computational materials and things with a sustainability-first approach for their entire lifecycle — (1) eco-friendly materials/manufacturing,  (2) battery-free system operation (3)  responsible end-of-the-lifecycle disposal/reuse. For this, she works at the intersection of device fabrication, low-power systems, and design. She also actively applies my work to application domains like smart home control, health, accessibility, biodiversity, and urban infrastructure monitoring.

Sustainable Computational Materials

Sustainable Computational Materials graphicCreating useful computational materials and things with a sustainability-first perspective for their entire life-cycle.

Expanded sustainable computational materials graphic and interactive stickers



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

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)

Arora, Nivedita, 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]

Arora, Nivedita, 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]

Curtiss, Alexander, 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]

Arora, Nivedita, 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.