People | MIT AUTO-ID LABORATORY

	Prof. Sanjay Sarma is MIT's Vice President for Open Learning and the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Sarma founded the Auto-ID Center at MIT (now MIT Auto-ID Labs) and developed many of the key technologies behind the EPC suite of RFID standards now used worldwide. He was also the the founder and CTO of OATSystems, which was acquired by Checkpoint Systems (NYSE: CKP) in 2008. He sits on the boards of GS1, EPCglobal and several startup companies. Dr. Sarma received his Bachelors from the Indian Institute of Technology, his Masters from Carnegie Mellon University and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. In between degrees, Sarma worked at Schlumberger Oilfield Services in Aberdeen, UK, and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in Berkeley, California. He has authored over 50 academic papers in computational geometry, sensing, RFID, automation and CAD, and is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and research including the MacVicar Fellowship, the Business Week eBiz
	Prof. Brian Subirana is Director of the MIT Auto-ID lab, Director of the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology, Research Scientist at MIT and also teaches at Harvard University. His Harvard class on Artificial Intelligence is the first MIT-run non-residential on-line class ever to offer academic credit. His MIT Sloan class was the first course ever to offer a recorded lecture on MIT Open Courseware. Before becoming an academic, he worked at The Boston Consulting Group. Prof. Subirana obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now CSAIL), his MBA at MIT Sloan, has founded three start-ups, and has been affiliated with MIT for over 20 years in various capacities including Visiting Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research centers on Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence, focusing on manufacturing, e-learning, the creative industries and digital health. He is developing a Voice Name System that can help humans talk with any object in an IoT environment. During the COVID-19 pandemic he is researching standardized multi-modal biomarkers that can help smart speakers pre-screen for positive and negative cases of various conditions including COVID, dementia and Alzheimer's.
	Rahul Bhattacharyya is a Research Scientist at the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory. He obtained a Bachelors and Masters Integrated Dual Degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. His research interests broadly encompass the development and integration of technologies that form the framework for the Internet of Things. He is particularly interested in low-cost, pervasive wireless sensor design using smart materials and novel antenna designs and predictive analytics for fault detection using machine-learning techniques. Rahul has served various roles on the organizing committee of the IEEE International Conference on RFID 2010-15 and was technical program co-chair of the 4^th International Conference on the Internet of Things. He currently holds membership of the IEEE and the International Society for Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure.
	Jason Ku is a Post-Doc in CSAIL at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on a wide range of topics related to algorithmic computational geometry, concentrating on 3D spacial mapping algorithms and folding algorithms applied to real world mechanical problems. Ku also serves on the Board of Directors of OrigamiUSA and is the Managing Editor for their online magazine, The Fold.
	Partha Sarathi Bhattacharjee is a researcher and graduate student at MIT where he studies engineering, management, and policy as a candidate in two interdisciplinary programs. He served as an analyst and consultant to the biopharmaceutical industry prior to commencing his graduate education.
	Isaac Ehrenberg is a research affiliate at the MIT Auto-ID Lab, and has served as the lab’s Associate Director. He studied Physics at Yeshiva College before slipping under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s radar to attend some classes and a graduation or two. Not ironically, his research interests relate to said radar, but more accurately to the fabrication of 3D electromagnetic structures including metamaterials and antennas that can be used to enhance radar and similar systems including RFID. He is particularly interested in the application of Additive Manufacturing to electromagnetic device design and fabrication. Isaac is least known for being the root cause of an infamous White House Petition.
	Yongbin Sun is from Xinjiang, China. He is currently working on RFID augmented vision, which realizes fast, robust and accurate object identification in video feeds using feature information retrieved from RFID tags in the environment. He likes traveling and playing basketball. In his free time, he likes hiking with his wife and dog.
	Laura Van Houten is an Administrative Assistant at the Auto-ID Laboratory and is also affiliated with the Mechanical Engineering department at MIT. Within the MechE Department she is primarily assisting Sanjay Sarma and Timothy Gutowski. She holds a B.S. in Spanish and French from SUNY Oneonta as well as a M.S. in Spanish Legal Translation from New York University. Before joining MIT in 2019, Laura specialized in administration for personal injury and intellectual property law.
	Jon Stine is an MIT Affiliate at the School of Engineering and Auto-ID Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his work with MIT, Jon led global retail and consumer goods industry enterprise sales and strategy for the Intel Corporation, working with world’s leading brands on issues of digital transformation, ranging from the future of the store to artificial intelligence to the new shopper decision journey. He also served a seven-year stint with the industry consulting practice of Cisco Systems, advising top-tier US and India retailers, and spent more than a decade as head of sales for a leading better-priced womenswear apparel brand, working directly with the nation’s largest department and specialty retailers. In 2016, whilte at Intel, Jon initiated a partnership between the Auto-ID Laboratory, Capgemini S.A., and the Intel Corporation to study the technologies and impact of artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistant platforms. That research led to the publication in January 2018 of an oft-cited white paper on conversational commerce, and laid the foundation for the current AI-voice technology and standards research by the Auto-ID lab, and the development of the Open Voice Network.
	Josh Siegel has been affiliated with the MIT Auto-ID laboratory for over 10 years and is currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University and the lead instructor for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Internet of Things Bootcamp. He received Ph.D., S.M. and S.B. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. Josh and his automotive companies have been recognized with accolades including the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize and the MassIT Government Innovation Prize. He has multiple issued patents, published in top scholarly venues, and been featured in popular media. Dr. Siegel's ongoing research develops architectures for secure and efficient connectivity, applications for pervasive sensing to vehicle diagnostics, and new approaches to autonomous driving.
	Shoumen Pa Datta is a senior member of the Auto ID Labs and MIT Affiliate at the School of Engineering at MIT. He is the former Senior Vice President of the Industrial Internet Consortium (2013-2016) and Co-Founder and Executive/Research Director of the MIT Forum for Supply Chain Innovation (2001-2009) at the MIT School of Engineering. He has taught Strategy and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was a Member of the Auto ID Center at MIT (1999-2003), MIT Data Center (2004-2006) and MIT Energy Initiative (2008-2009). As a Research Scientist, Engineering Systems Division, MIT School of Engineering, he has explored technology innovation, RFID, IoT and data analytics. He has offered executive education courses at MIT and several other institutions in US, EU and APAC. Shoumen earned his PhD in Molecular Biology from Rutgers University School of Medicine (UMDNJ) in research collaboration with Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He was a Research Fellow in Medicine (Neuro-Endocrinology) at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was a Research Associate at the Whitehead Institute at MIT and a member of the Human Genome Project at MIT. He was a Research Scientist at University of California UCSF School of Medicine, San Francisco, California. In between his careers in research/medicine and engineering/management, he has served in the public sector to improve K-12 public education as a Special Assistant to the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, Science Education Partnership at UCSF School of Medicine and Berkeley Pledge initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. For additional details go to http://bit.ly/SD-BIO and http://bit.ly/MIT-IOT. Publications http://bit.ly/MIT-SD and CV http://bit.ly/SD-CV-2016 Please write to shoumen@mit.edu or visit http://bit.ly/S-Datta to connect via social media.
	Dick Cantwell is an MIT Affiliate at the School of Engineering and Auto-ID Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His focus is creating business value in the networked digital economy. As Vice President - Cisco Systems, he led strategy and innovation consulting at the intersection of business process and technology. Prior to that, Cantwell directed consumer marketing, advertising, new product development and business transformation at Procter & Gamble, Gillette and Johnson & Johnson. He led P&G/Gillette’s pioneering involvement in RFID and helped establish the Auto-ID Center at MIT. He served as Chairman of its Board of Overseers and then Chairman of the Board of Governors for GS1 EPCglobal, developing many of the key global industry RFID standards for product identification, supply chain visibility and electronic data exchange. Cantwell has spoken at MIT, Stanford and Oxford, as well as keynoted major international industry conferences including the NRF’s Big Show, and served as advisor to several start-ups including OAT Systems, Mojix and Alien Technology. He received the New England Business and Technology Association Award for Innovation, appeared on Computerworld’s list of the Most Powerful People in Networking, was selected one of the Top 25 Consumer Product Visionaries by Consumer Goods Technology, has been named one of Advertising Age’s Top 100 Marketers and was a Cannes Advertising Award winner. Cantwell is a graduate of Harvard University and received his master’s degree in business administration from Dartmouth College.
	Alexandre Urpi is a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research consists of creating seamless interfaces between people, objects and spaces by combining the fields of biosignal sensing and the Internet of Things. He is currently doing research in brain-computer interfaces for the Internet of Things and Virtual Reality as well as developing a personalized thermal comfort sensing system using wearable devices for biological signal monitoring. Alex received his masters in mechanical engineering from MIT in 2018 and he has a double degree in Telecommunications Engineering and Industrial Engineering by UPC BarcelonaTech. He joined Professor Sarma’s group in 2015 as a visiting student to complete his undergraduate thesis, where he did research in RFID tag antenna-based sensing and investigated applications for RFID tags used as actuators. In 2016 he joined the Field Intelligence Lab as a research assistant. He is a “La Caixa” fellow (2018).
	Pankhuri Sen is a Research Associate at AutoID Labs and a graduate student in engineering and management at MIT. Pankhuri’s research at MIT focuses on new methods to enable Tag Antenna based Sensing for IoT applications. Pankhuri studied Electronics and Communication for her undergraduate degree in Engineering where her research interests centered around communication technologies, specifically the Free Space Optical (FSO) communication links. During her professional experience of five years at semiconductor and communications major- Qualcomm, Pankhuri worked extensively on enhancing various aspects of the power and thermal performance of Snapdragon chips for smartphones and IoT based products. Pankhuri is passionate about technology and it’s human-centered applications for making the world a smarter place.
	Nithin Reddy is a researcher and graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research interests are in investigating new applications for RFID-based sensing and low power photovoltaics for Indoor Internet of Things (IoT) devices. He received his masters from The Pennsylvania State University in 2016 and bachelors from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 2013. During his masters, he designed various lightweight components using topology optimization and metal additive manufacturing for real-world applications. He has also worked with ITC Ltd., Indian major in fast moving consumer goods, as a manufacturing manager where helped setup a manufacturing plant in Bangalore for ITC's foods business. His past and current projects involve collaborations with researchers, physicians and engineers at MIT, Harvard, Mass General Hospital, Schlumberger, Volvo, 3D printing startups, Sculptprint, VTech, Georgia Tech, Applied Research Laboratory (Penn State). Outside the lab he likes chess, travel and movies.
	Dajiang Suo
	Denise Tellbach is a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her research interests are in manufacturing, IoT, and applying machine learning to enhance the functionality of control systems for manufacturing. Denise received a double masters degree in Management Science and Mechanical Engineering from RWTH Aachen University and Tsinghua University in 2018 and her undergraduate degree from RWTH Aachen University in 2016. In the past she has developed a maturity model for the digitalization of production control. She has also worked on cyber-physical systems modelling and reliability assessment focussing on electric grid. She joined the AutoID Lab as a graduate student under Prof. Sarma in 2019 and is a Presidential Fellow at MIT (2019).
	Prithvi Rajasekaran is a researcher at the MIT Auto ID Lab. He specializes in full stack development and his work centers around developing architecture for artificial intelligence applications, with a particular focus on voice applications and conversational commerce.
	Ferran Hueto Puig graduated from UCLA in Mechanical Engineering in Spring 2018. Soon after that, he joined the AutoID Lab's Conversational Commerce team as a Researcher. Before this, he had previously worked in the lab as an undergraduate student developing an open interactive e-learning platform focussed on IoT. He is currently working on developing speech recognition solutions for conversational commerce, including the development of the Voice Name System, a multimedia platform to collect and process speech samples for deep learning, using sound texture synthesis techniques to improve speech recognition training, and designing a standard grammar and architecture for smart speaker's so called "wake words" in a similar fashion to the DNS of the internet.
	Stephen Ho
	Fátima Villa received a B.S. degree in Telecommunications Systems Engineering from Tecnun Engineering School, University of Navarra, San Sebastián in 2017. Currently she is pursuing a M.Sc. degree inTelecommunications Engineering in Tecnun and doing the Master's Thesis at the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory. Her research interests include microwave, antennas, chipped and chipless RFID sensors, electronic circuits and digital signal processing.
	Kevin Marty is a visiting student from the Auto ID partner lab ETH/HSG in Switzerland. Kevin is pursuing a master program in mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and is writing his master thesis at the MIT Auto ID Laboratory. His thesis focuses on mixed reality application and the localization problem in vision. His research area includes computer vision, deep learning and mixed reality.