Karan Ahuja Receives Ryan Family Research Acceleration Fund Award
Strategic seed funding fuels transformative research and translation to advance the biosciences and produce societal benefit
Northwestern Engineering's Karan Ahuja has received a Ryan Family Research Acceleration Fund award.
In its second round of awards, the fund bestowed more than $2 million to support eight exceptional research projects to translate cutting-edge life science discoveries into transformative, real-world solutions.
Ahuja is the Lisa Wissner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Assistant Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering.
Ahuja's Ryan Acceleration Fund project aims to develop scalable, accessible motion-capture technology to revolutionize consumer health monitoring. His team seeks to make high-quality motion tracking affordable and broadly available, unlocking next-generation health applications.
Ahuja and his team recently created MobilePoser, a new system for full-body motion capture that uses sensors already embedded within consumer mobile devices, including smartphones, smart watches and wireless earbuds.
Ahuja directs the Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing & Experiences (SPICE) Lab. Leveraging techniques in novel sensors and sensing techniques, embedded systems, signal processing, computer vision, and on-device machine learning, the research group develops cutting-edge computing technologies that sense, track, and understand humans to augment their interactions and assist them in daily life.
Ahuja earned a 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Outstanding Dissertation Award. He was also named to the Forbes "30 Under 30 Asia 2024" and the MIT Technology Review "Innovators Under 35 Asia Pacific."