Akshay Gadre

I am an Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of University of Washington. I recently received my Ph.D in ECE at Carnegie Mellon University where my research operated at the intersection of wireless, mobile and cyber-physical systems with special focus on empowering the low-power Internet-of-Things devices deployed on earth and space. At University of Washington, my lab explores the upcoming application domains such as satellite IoT, agriculture and underwater devices, to apply our wireless expertise for improving communication and sensing capability of these devices while preserving the security and privacy of sensor data.

• ACM SenSys 2026 Best Demo Award
• ACM SenSys 2026 Distinguished TPC Member Award
• AFRL SDR Challenge 2026 - Best Demo Award
• ACM TEI 2026 Best Demo Honorable Mention Award - Jury's Choice
• ACM MobiSys 2025 Best Demo Award
• T-Mobile T-Challenge 2024 : AI for Telecommunications Most Engaging Presentation Award
• ACM SIGBED-SIGSOFT Frank Anger Memorial Award 2021
• Awarded the 2020-21 CMU CyLab Presidential Fellowship
• ACM/IEEE IPSN 2020 Best Paper Award (QuAiL)
• ACM/IEEE IPSN Ph.D Forum 2020 Best Presentation Award (Low-Power IoT)
• ACM MOBICOM 2018 Best Poster Runner-up Award (LoRaTilt)
• ACM/IEEE IPSN 2018 Best Paper Award (Charm)

Agricultural Sensing : Building wireless/mobile systems to measure the health of crop and farm

Building Underwater Sensing Modalities : New Sensor design for sensing objects underwater.

Space Constellations: Rethinking satellite communication in the era of space constellations

mmWave Radars: Distributed and Mobile Radars for Sensing and Imaging

Radio Digital Twins: Leveraging synthetic wireless priors for self-supervised learning of data-driven wireless systems

• TwinFocus: Autofocus for Handheld mmWave SAR Imaging via Physical and Digital Twin References, June 2026, Yadong Li, Xinghua Sun, Qiancheng Li, Akshay Gadre, ACM MobiSys 2026 
• MulDar: Unleashing the Potential of Distributed COTS mmWave Radar by Exploiting Cross-Device Channels, June 2026, Xinghua Sun, Qiancheng Li, Akshay Gadre, ACM MobiSys 2026
• Towards Practical Bi-Static Polarimetric Imaging using Commodity mmWave Radars for Material Sensing, May 2026, Xinghua Sun, Akshay Gadre, ACM SenSys 2026
• AMULET : Acoustic Metastructure for Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Underwater using a Single Hydrophone, May 2026, Andrew Bergey, Nakul Garg, Akshay Gadre, ACM SenSys 2026  [Also ACM SenSys 2026 Best Demo Award]
• WiReSens Toolkit: An Open-source Platform towards Accessible Wireless Tactile Sensing, Mar 2026, Devin Murphy, Junyi Zhu, Akshay Gadre, Antonio Torralba, Paul Liang, Wojciech Matusik, Yiyue Luo, ACM TEI 2026 [Also ACM TEI 2026 Best Demo Honorable Mention Award - Jury's Choice]
• GazeSummary: Exploring Gaze as an Implicit Prompt for Personalization in text-based LLM Tasks, Feb 2026, Jiexin Ding, Yizhuo Zhang, Xinyun Liu, Ke Chen, Yuntao Wang, Shwetak Patel, Akshay Gadre, ACM HotMobile 2026
• UltraPoser : Pushing the Limits of IMU-based Full-Body Pose Estimation with Ultrasound Sensing on Consumer Wearables, Sept 2025, Yadong Li, Shuning Wang, Y. Fu, J. Chen, X. Chen, J. Ren, X. Zhang, Akshay Gadre, and Ke Sun, ACM UIST 2025
• On the Feasibility of Laser Inter-satellite Links for Low-latency High Frequency Trading, Oct 2024, Vaibhav Singh, Akshay Gadre, ACM LEO-NET 2024
• ToMoBrush: Exploring Dental Health Sensing using a Sonic Toothbrush, June 2024, Kuang Yuan, M. Ibrahim, Y. Song, G. Deng, R. Nerone, S. Vijayan, Akshay Gadre, S. Kumar, ACM IMWUT 2024 / UbiComp 2025 [Also ACM MobiSys 2025 Best Demo Award]
• Adapting LoRa Ground Stations for Low-latency Imaging and Inference from LoRa-enabled CubeSats, June 2024, Akshay Gadre, Z. Manchester, S. Kumar, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks 2024

Doctoral

Xinghua Sun

Yadong Li

Qiancheng Li

Andrew Bergey

Jiexin Ding (co-advised with Shwetak Patel)

Devin Murphy (co-advised with Yiyue Luo)

Graduate

Dominic Myerchin

Undergraduate

EE 242 : Signal Processing 1, AUT 22, AUT 23

EE 417 : Modern Wireless Communication, WIN 25*, WIN 26*, WIN 27*

EE 419 : Intro to Computer Networks, SPR 25*, SPR 26*, SPR 27*

EE 506 : Modern Wireless Communication, WIN 25*, WIN 26*, WIN 27*

EE 565 : Intro to Computer Networks, WIN 23, WIN 24, SPR 25*, SPR 26*, SPR 27*

EE 595A : Advanced Topics in Communication : Space and mmWave Networked Systems, SPR 23, AUT 25

EE 595B : Advanced Topics in Communication : Agriculture and Urban IoT Systems, SPR 24

* Cross-listed undergraduate and graduate course

Graduate

Vaibhav Singh (M.S. ECE Thesis : On the Feasibility of Laser Inter-satellite Links for Low-latency High Frequency Trading) => U.Pitt. ECE PhD

Matthew Pana (M.S. ECE Thesis : Pearl: A more reliable LoRaWAN) => Boeing

Karen Aguilar (M.S. ECE Thesis : Surface Soil Moisture Sensing using Visible Light Polarimetry)

Undergraduate

Qiancheng Li => UW ECE PhD

High School

Franklin Carter => CMU Undergraduate