This talk will cover a new generation of technologies that can sense, connect, and perceive the physical world in unprecedented ways. These technologies promise transformative impact on areas spanning climate change monitoring, ocean exploration, healthcare, food security, robotics, and even extraterrestrial exploration.

The talk will cover three core technologies invented by Prof. Adib and his team. The first is an ocean internet-of-things (IoT) that uses battery-free sensors for climate-change monitoring, marine life discovery, and seafood production (aquaculture). The second is a wireless sensing technology that can “see through walls” and monitor people’s vital signs (including their breathing and heart rate) without requiring any contact with the human body. The third is a physical intelligence platform that extracts new data from billions of already-deployed IoT sensors to enable new applications in retail, robotics, and automation.

The talk will touch on the journey of these technologies from their inception at MIT to international collaborations and startups that aim to translate them to real-world impact in areas spanning healthcare, climate change, and supply chain.

About Fadel Adib

Fadel Adib is an Associate Professor in the MIT Media Lab and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is the founding director of the Signal Kinetics group which invents wireless and sensor technologies for networking, health monitoring, robotics, and ocean IoT. He is also the founder & CEO of Cartesian Systems, a spinoff from his lab that focuses on mapping the physical world at unprecedented scale. Adib was named by Technology Review as one of the world’s top 35 innovators under 35 and by Forbes as 30 under 30. His research on wireless sensing (X-Ray Vision) was recognized as one of the 50 ways MIT has transformed Computer Science, and his work on robotic perception (Finder of Lost Things) was named as one of the 103 Ways MIT is Making a Better World. Adib’s commercialized technologies have been used to monitor thousands of patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and COVID19, and he has had the honor to demo his work to President Obama at the White House. Adib is also the recipient of various awards including the NSF CAREER Award (2019), the ONR Young Investigator Award (2019), the ONR Early Career Grant (2020), the Google Faculty Research Award (2017), the Sloan Research Fellowship (2021), and the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award (2022), and his papers have won awards for best papers, demos, and highlights at premier academic venues including SIGCOMM, MobiCom, CHI, and Nature Electronics. Adib received his Bachelors from the American University of Beirut (2011) and his PhD from MIT (2016), where his thesis won the Sprowls award for Best Doctoral Dissertation at MIT and the ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award.

This event will be conducted in English