Karan Ahuja

I am a Lisa Wissner-Slivka & Benjamin Slivka Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Northwestern University where I direct the Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing & Experiences (SPICE) Lab . I received my Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University in 2023 and B.Tech. in Computer Science in 2017. I am a recipient of the Forbes 30 under 30, MIT 35 innovators under 35 Asia Pacific, ACM SIGCHI Special Recognition, and ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award. I have recently been a Visiting Research Scientist at Google leading efforts on Augmented Reality and Experiences, and have previously worked at Apple, Microsoft Research, Meta Reality Labs and IBM Research.

My research group creates cutting-edge computing technologies that sense, track, and understand humans to augment their interactions and assist them in daily life. We tackle challenging research problems in high-impact application areas such as mobile health sensing, extended reality, embodied perception and natural user interfaces. We leverage expertise in novel sensors & sensing techniques, embedded systems, multimodal learning, computer vision, and on-device machine learning to deploy and evaluate these technologies in real-world settings. Many of our projects have been open-sourced, deployed in the wild, licensed, shipped as product features (including features used by over 100 million users) and have influenced flagship products at leading companies like Google and Apple.

Prospective students: I am hiring at all levels (post-docs, PhDs, masters, undergrads, and visitors); please fill in this form if you are interested in joining the lab.