Karan Ahuja

PhD Student
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
CV/Resume . Google Scholar. Fun Projects

About Karan

I'm a 4th year Ph.D. student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Dr. Chris Harrison and Dr. Mayank Goel. My research focuses on Machine Learning and Sensing. I use my background in computer vision, signal processing and applied machine learning to imbue practical sensing in mobile and IoT platforms, thus enabling them to be the drivers of ubiquitous and unobtrusive sensing. This enables a broad range of applications spanning across various domains, including health monitoring, activity recognition, context-aware computing and novel interaction techniques.

Selected Research

I publish my research at premiere venues in computer science. Click on the details button to open the project-specific webpage to access supporting materials. For a full list of my patents and publications, please download my CV.

Synthesizing Doppler Radar Data from Videos for Training Privacy-Preserving Activity Recognition

Karan Ahuja, Yue Jiang, Mayank Goel, Chris Harrison CHI 2021

Classroom Digital Twins with Instrumentation-Free 6DOF Gaze Tracking

Karan Ahuja, Deval Shah, Sujeath Pareddy, Franceska Xhakaj, Amy Ogan, Yuvraj Agarwal, Chris Harrison CHI 2021

Pose-on-the-Go: Approximating Partial User Pose with Smartphone Sensor Fusion and Inverse Kinematics

Karan Ahuja, Sven Mayer, Mayank Goel, Chris Harrison CHI 2021

Direction-of-Voice (DoV) Estimation for Intuitive Speech Interaction with Smart Devices Ecosystems

Karan Ahuja, Andy Kong, Mayank Goel, Chris Harrison UIST 2020

BodySLAM: Opportunistic User Digitization in Multi-User AR/VR Experiences

Karan Ahuja, Mayank Goel, Chris Harrison SUI 2020

MeCap: Whole-Body Digitization for Low-Cost VR/AR Headsets

Karan Ahuja, Robert Xiao, Mayank Goel, Chris Harrison UIST 2019
Honorable Mention Award

LightAnchors: Appropriating Point Lights for Spatially-Anchored Augmented Reality Interfaces

Karan Ahuja, Sujeath Pareddy, Robert Xiao, Mayank Goel, Chris Harrison UIST 2019

EduSense: Practical Classroom Sensing at Scale

Karan Ahuja, Dohyun Kim, Franceska Xhakaj, Virag Varga, Anne Xie, Stanley Zhang, Jay Eric Townsend, Chris Harrison, Amy Ogan, Yuvraj Agarwal UbiComp 2019

ScratchThat: Supporting Command-Agnostic Speech Repair in Voice-Driven Assistants

Jason Wu, Karan Ahuja, Richard Li, Victor Chen, Jeffrey Bigham. UbiComp 2019

GymCam: Detecting, recognizing, and tracking simultaneous exercises in unconstrained scenes

Rushil Khurana, Karan Ahuja, Zac Yu, Jennifer Mankoff, Chris Harrison, Mayank Goel. UbiComp 2019

Ubicoustics: Plug-and-Play Acoustic Activity Recognition

Gierad Laput, Karan Ahuja, Mayank Goel, Chris Harrison. UIST 2018

EyeSpyVR: Interactive Eye Sensing Using Off-the-Shelf Smartphone based VR headsets

Karan Ahuja, Rahul Islam, Varun Parashar, Kuntal Dey, Chris Harrison, Mayank Goel. UbiComp 2018

OptiDwell: Intelligent Adjustment of Dwell Click Time

Anand Nayyar, Utkarsh Dwivedi, Karan Ahuja, Nitendra Rajput, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey. IUI 2017

Convolutional Neural Networks for Ocular Smartphone-Based Biometrics

Karan Ahuja, Rahul Islam, Ferdous Barbhuiya, Kuntal Dey. PRL 2017

Eye center localization and detection using radial mapping

Karan Ahuja, Ruchika Banarjee, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey, Ferdous Barbhuiya. ICIP 2016

Professional Experience

2019 Microsoft Research Labs (Redmond, USA)
2016 IBM Research Labs (New Delhi, India)
2015 IBM Research Labs (New Delhi, India)

Awards and Honors

2020 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Finalist
2020 Collegiate Inventors Competition Graduate Finalist
2020 Fast Company Innovation by Design Finalist
2019 Honorable Mention Award, ACM UIST
2017 President's Gold Medal India
2017 IBM Blue Scholar

Academic Service

2021 ACM MobileHCI Program Committee, AC, Papers
2021 ACM CHI Program Committee, AC, Late-Breaking Work
2020 ACM CHI Program Committee, AC, Late-Breaking Work
2020 ACM UIST Organizing Committee, Video Chair

Reviewing (50+ Papers)

ACM CHI '19, '20, '21
ACM UIST '19, '20
ACM IMWUT '18, '19, '20
IEEE ISMAR '20
ACM ISS '20
ACM MobileHCI '19
IEEE TBIOM '21
IET Image Processing '18
Elsevier CVIU '17

Demos

Presented live demos to conference attendees at several venues, including:

UbiComp '18, '19
UIST '19
CONIX '18, '19

Presented demos of my research to numerous companies and popular press, including: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, GE, Phillips, Butler Technology and Intel.

Invited Talks and Presentations

2020 Carnegie Mellon University, Edge Computing
2020 Microsoft Research AI Breakthroughs
2020 Carnegie Mellon University, Guest Lecture
2020 Apple Machine Hearing and Sensing
2020 Apple AI and Machine Interaction
2019 AREA Research

Selected Press Coverage

2020 Engadget, AI could tell smart speakers what direction..."
2020 Hackaday, Robots can finally answer are you talking to..."
2020 The Register, Hey, over here, I'm talking. Academics..."
2020 PRNewsWire, 2020 Collegiate Inventors Competition..."
2019 Digital Trends, Think your house is smart now? Here's..."
2019 The Register, LightAnchors array: LEDs in routers..."
2019 Hackaday, Modulated Pilot Lights Anchor AR to real..."
2019 NPR (WESA.FM), CMU Researchers Developing Tech To..."
2019 TechXplore, EduSense: Researchers develop compreh..."
2019 NewAtlas, Computer vision system tracks instructors..."
2019 Display Daily, MeCap Can Add Low Cost Whole-Body..."
2019 LabRoots, GymCam Can Track Exercise Effectively than..."
2019 ScienceDaily, GymCam Tracks Exercises that wearable..."
2019 I-programmer, GymCam Tracks Your Workout"
2019 Medgadget, GymCam Automatically Classifies Counts..."
2019 ZDnet, This camera watches while you work out"
2019 Hackaday, GymCam knows exactly what you've been..."
2019 New Atlas, Computer vision system tracks workouts..."
2018 Engadget, Speculative gadgets at the Future Interfaces..."
2018 TechCrunch, This robot uses lasers to 'listen' to... "
2018 The Register (UK), Alexa knows what you did last..."
2018 Science Daily, Sound, vibration recognition boost..."
2018 Futurity, Sound and vibrations let smart devices know..."

Contact Information

For any inquiries: kahuja@cs.cmu.edu. I am also a member of the Future Interfaces Group and the Smart Sensing for Humans Lab at CMU. Questions regarding my labs can be directed to info@figlab.com and mayankgoel@cmu.edu respectively. For licensing and tech-transfer questions, please contact: Cindy Chepanoski (cchepano@andrew.cmu.edu) who is part of the CMU Intellectual Property team.