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 Embodied System Lab

Departments

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Computer Science

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

At the Embodied System Lab, At the Embodied Systems Lab, we pursue the idea that intelligence is fundamentally embodied—arising from physical structure, energy flow, and sustained interaction with the environment rather than centralized computation alone. Guided by this view, the lab rethinks the cyber-physical computing stack across materials, morphology, energy dynamics, computer architecture, and adaptive learning and control. We develop energy-autonomous systems that embed sensing, computation, and actuation directly into physical substrates and harvest energy from their surroundings to enable persistent, real-time intelligence. Our research spans precision agriculture, plant-integrated sensing, sustainable computational materials, and human-centered embodied systems, with an emphasis on frugal, scalable, and field-deployable designs that bridge biology and computing.


Significant Recognition

  • IEEE Pervasive Computing Emerging Rockstar
  • 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 2026 https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3745782


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.