Carnegie Mellon University
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Yuvraj Agarwal

Yuvraj Agarwal

Associate Professor, Software and Societal Systems

Address
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Bio

Yuvraj Agarwal is a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, and the director of SynergyLabs. He is affiliated with the Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), and ECE (by courtesy) at CMU. His group focuses on building hardware and software systems that are safe, secure and privacy sensitive for application domains including smart buildings, Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Mobile Devices. In addition to publications at competitive conferences (MobiSys, Ubicomp, SenSys, IPSN, NSDI, USENIX, Oakland, USENIX, BuildSys, CHI) SynergyLabs specifically strives to build and deploy systems that have real world impact and benefit society. His research has been covered by the popular press including the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Politico, MIT Technology Review, Nature, Engadget, etc. Several of the systems that Yuvraj and his students have built have been deployed at scale on the CMU and UCSD. The systems that he has built for studying mobile privacy have been used by hundreds of thousands of users and have had significant industrial impact. Most recently, Yuvraj was invited to the U.S. White House to present his IoT Security and Privacy Label work, which has influenced the launch of the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark for connected devices and is influencing several other global efforts. Yuvraj is a member of the IEEE, ACM and USENIX.

Education

PhD, Computer Science and Engineering. UC San Diego

  • Distributed Systems
  • Building User Focused Sensing Systems
  • Usable Security
  • Privacy Green Computing

Projects

  • CoDec: Computational Decarbonization of Societal Infrastructure
  • Mites: Building an End-to-End Hardware-Software IoT stack
  • Improving Human Activity Recognition Systems (Papers: VAX, TAO)
  • Building Trustworthy IoT Infrastructure (Papers: ThingPoll, Pekaboo, Capture, TEO, etc).

Publications

"Mites: Design and Deployment of a General-Purpose Sensing Infrastructure for Buildings" Sudershan Boovaraghavan, Chen Chen, Anurag Maravi, Mike Czapik, Yang Zhang, Chris Harrison, Yuvraj Agarwal. Ubicomp 2023 -- ACM Transactions on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable Ubiquitous Technology (IMWUT'23), October, 2023. URL: https://synergylabs.org/yuvraj/docs/Boovaraghavan_Ubicomp23_Mites.pdf

"Are Consumers Willing to Pay for Security and Privacy of IoT Devices?" Pardis Emami-Naeni, Janarth Dheenadhayalan, Yuvraj Agarwal, Lorrie Cranor USENIX Security 2023 -- 32nd USENIX Security Symposium, 2023 URL: https://synergylabs.org/yuvraj/docs/Emami-Naeni_USENIX23_ConsumerWillingnesstoPay.pdf "Kirigami: Lightweight Speech Filtering for Privacy-Preserving Activity Recognition using Audio" Sudershan Boovaraghavan, Haozhe Zhou, Mayank Goel, Yuvraj Agarwal. Ubicomp 2024 -- ACM Transactions on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable Ubiquitous Technology (IMWUT'24), October, 2024. URL: https://synergylabs.org/yuvraj/docs/Boovaraghavan_Ubicomp24_Kirigami.pdf

"VAX: Using Existing Video and Audio-based Activity Recognition Models to Bootstrap Privacy-Sensitive Sensors" Prasoon Patidar, Mayank Goel, Yuvraj Agarwal. Ubicomp 2023 -- ACM Transactions on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable Ubiquitous Technology (IMWUT'23), October, 2023. URL: https://synergylabs.org/yuvraj/docs/Patidar_Ubicomp23_VAX.pdf

"EduSense: Practical Classroom Sensing at Scale" Karan Ahuja, Dohyun Kim, Franceska Khakaj, Virag Varga, Anne Xie, Stanley Zhang, Jay Eric Townsend, Chris Harrison, Amy Ogan, Yuvraj Agarwal. Ubicomp 2019 -- ACM Transactions on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable Ubiquitous Technology (IMWUT'19), September, 2019. URL: https://synergylabs.org/yuvraj/docs/Kim_Ubicomp19_EduSense.pdf