About me

MariaGorlatova_PhotoNortel Networks Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science, Duke University

Office: 409 Wilkinson. Lab: 443 Wilkinson [lab info].

E-mail: maria.gorlatova /at/ duke.edu

Research interests: My research focuses on the challenges and opportunities associated with adding connectivity and intelligence to every device big and small — the cross-disciplinary area known as the Internet of Things. This work crosses traditional discipline boundaries and requires thinking across multiple layers of system and protocol stacks. I am particularly interested in the opportunities associated with fog and edge computing, and in breaking the barriers for technologies that enable fundamentally new deployments and experiences, such as energy harvesting and mobile augmented reality. More about my current research.

Bio: Prior to starting my position at Duke, I was an Associate Research Scholar and an Associate Director of the EDGE Lab at Princeton University Department of Electrical Engineering, where I worked with Prof. Mung Chiang. I earned my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in the Wireless and Mobile Networking Lab led by Prof. Gil Zussman. My Ph.D. dissertation was recognized with the highest departmental distinction, Jury Award for Outstanding Achievement in Communications. I earned the B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) and the M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Ottawa, Canada. Before and after my Ph.D. I worked in industry in research, development, and business strategy. After my Ph.D. I was an Engineering Program Manager at D. E. Shaw Research and a Senior Strategy Consultant at IBM Corporate Headquarters Chief Economist’s Office.

I received multiple awards including the 2023 DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2021 NSF CAREER Award, 2021 Facebook Research Award, 2023 CISCO Research Award, 2020 IBM Faculty Award, 2016 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award, 2020 ACM/IEEE IPSN Best Research Artifact Award, and 2011 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications. I also received the Google Anita Borg USA Fellowship, Columbia University Presidential Fellowship, and top national Alexander Graham Bell Canadian Graduate Scholar (CGS) NSERC M.Sc. and Ph.D. Fellowships. I serve on technical program committees of multiple conferences including ACM SenSys, ACM/IEEE IPSN, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICDCS, ACM SIGCOMM, and ACM MobiCom. I have chaired the TPC of the Edge Computing track of IEEE ICDCS and the TPC of ACM/IEEE IPSN.

Industry leadership: My industry experience helps me work across the industry-academia divide. I actively participated in the OpenFog Consortium, an industry-wide initiative that defined fog computing architectures [moderating a panel of industry experts] [talking about fog computing at an NYC IoT Central meetup] [presenting OpenFog communications framework at 2017 IEEE Fog World Congress]. I judged prestigious Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Innovation Awards, and have co-chaired the Internet of Things and Wearable Technology track of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, attended by over 18,000 people.
MariaGorlatova_2
Outside of work: I am a runner and a triathlete. I competed in more than 70 races including 3 marathons, 3 Escape from Alcatraz triathlons, and an Ironman triathlon [blog post about the Ironman].  I have thrice qualified for, and once competed in, Triathlon Age Group National Championships [blog post about the nationals]. Fun fact 1: I ran at least one mile in 40 US states. [the map of the states and countries where I went running]. Fun fact 2: A motion trace of my 3-hour marathon preparation run appeared in my paper on harvesting energy of motion [Figure 6 in this paper] [related blog post]. New 2020: Fun fact 3: I have a new running partner, and we’ve already ramped up to running 30+ miles per week together!

I am always looking for creative, energetic, and hard-working BS, MS, and PhD students to join my Duke University lab. Please e-mail me your CV, transcripts, and a brief note about your research interests at maria.gorlatova /at/ duke.edu. [ More information about our current research projects ] [ Lab members ]

We are looking for a postdoc with expertise in applied ML in mobile systems’ or pervasive sensing contexts.

We also have a limited number of funded post-bacc positions, for US-based recent university graduates with experience with applied ML or XR. E-mail me your CV and transcripts if interested.

 Recent News and News Highlights

11/08/2024: Tianyi Hu presented our paper titled “SEESys: Online Pose Error Estimation System for Visual SLAM” at ACM SenSys 2024 (19.2% acceptance rate) [ Paper PDF ] [ GitHub repo ]

11/08/2024: Congratulations to Zhehan Qu on his 2024 IEEE ISMAR Doctoral Consortium Best Presentation Honorable Mention!

9/23/2024: Paper led by Tianyi Hu titled “Apple vs. Meta: A Comparative Study on Spatial Tracking in SOTA XR Headsets” will be appearing in Proc. ACM ImmerCom 2024 (co-located with ACM MobiCom 2024) [ Paper PDF ]

8/01/2024: Paper led by Zhehan Qu titled “Looking” into Attention Patterns in Extended Reality: An Eye Tracking-based Study” will be appearing in Proc. IEEE ISMAR 2024. [ Paper PDF ]

7/05/2024: Paper led by Tim Scargill titled “Environment Texture Optimization for Mobile Augmented Reality” will be appearing in Proc. ACM IMWUT 2024. [ Paper PDF ]

6/25/2024: Professor Gorlatova is participating in the Discover US Vision Workshop on Distributed Computing and Swarm Intelligence (invited participant).

6/24/2024: Professor Gorlatova is starting a 2-year term as an Associate Editor of the  ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN).

6/10/2024: Two Duke I3T Lab PhD students are off to exciting  XR internships this summer. Sarah Eom is now an ORISE Graduate Fellow at the Division of Imaging, Diagnostics, and Software Reliability in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where she is working on evaluating image registration in medical XR devices. Lin Duan is now a software engineering intern with NVIDIA Spatial XR team, where she is exploring cloud rendering and interaction with virtual objects in context of next-generation AR headset applications.

5/24/2024:  Our paper titled “BiGuide: A Bi-Level Data Acquisition Guidance for Object Detection on Mobile Devices” appeared in Proc. ACM/IEEE IPSN 2024 (21.5% acceptance rate). [ Paper PDF ]  [ GitHub repo ] This work received the conference’s Best Research Artifact Runner-up Award.

3/28/2024: Heartfelt congratulations to Zhehan Qu on his NSF AI Spring School Applied AI Poster Award.

10/25/2023: Prof. Gorlatova received the 2023 DARPA Young Faculty Award for a project titled “Runtime Identification of Detrimental Augmented Reality (AR) Experiences through AR-specific Quality of Experience (QoE) Modeling and Monitoring.”

9/7/2023: NSF IIS Small award: 3 year $600,000 award will help us ensure long-term robustness of object detection in AR applications.

8/10/2023: NSF CSR Medium award led by PI Gorlatova: 4 year $1.2 mln award will support our joint work with the groups of Carlee Joe-Wong and Jiasi Chen in the area of adaptive environmental awareness for collaborative augmented reality.

Education

2008 – 2013 Ph.D. Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY

  • Thesis: Energy Harvesting Networked Nodes: Measurements, Algorithms, and Prototyping [Thesis PDF]. Jury Award for Outstanding Achievement in Communications.
  • Advised by Prof. Gil Zussman [Academic genealogy]
  • Columbia University Presidential Fellowship, Canadian Graduate NSERC CGS Fellowship
  • GPA: 4.18/4.0

2005 – 2006 M.Sc. Electrical Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

2000 – 2004 B.Sc. Electrical Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

  • Summa Cum Laude
  • GPA 92/100, Major GPA 98/100

Additional training: Micro-MBA (IBM), Project Management (NYU), Product Management (NY General Assembly), Proposal Writing (Princeton University). Certifications: Project Management Professional.

Positions: Research

  • Nortel Networks Assistant Professor, Duke University Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Durham, NC, 2020 – present
  • Assistant Professor, Duke University Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science Departments, Durham, NC, 2018 – present
  • Associate Director, Princeton EDGE Lab, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 2017 – 2018
  • Associate Research Scholar, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 2016 – 2018
  • Postdoctoral Researcher, Columbia University, New York, NY, 2013
  • Presidential Fellow, Columbia University, New York, NY, 2008 – 2013
  • Research Assistant (Ph.D. internship), Disney Research, Zurich, Switzerland, 2011
  • Research Scientist, Telcordia Technologies, Piscataway, NJ, 2007 – 2008
  • Research Scientist, Defense R&D Canada, Ottawa, ON, 2004 – 2007

Positions: Other

Recent and Selected Publications

[ToAppearImmerCom24] T. Hu, F. Yang, T. Scargill, M. Gorlatova, Apple vs. Meta: A Comparative Study on Spatial Tracking in SOTA XR Headsets. To appear in Proc. ACM ImmerCom (co-located with ACM MobiCom), Nov. 2024. [ Paper PDF ]

[SenSys24] T. Hu, T. Scargill, Y. Chen, F. Yang, G. Lan, and M. Gorlatova. SEESys: Online Pose Error Estimation System for Visual SLAM. In Proc. ACM SenSys, Nov. 2024 (19.2% acceptance rate). [ Paper PDF ] [ GitHub repo ]

[ISMAR24] Z. Qu, R. Byrne, and M. Gorlatova. “Looking” into Attention Patterns in Extended Reality: An Eye Tracking-based Study. Proc. IEEE ISMAR, Oct. 2024. [ Paper PDF ]

[IMWUT24] T. Scargill, R. Janamsetty, C. Fronk, S. Eom, and M. Gorlatova, Environment Texture Optimization for Mobile Augmented Reality. Proc. ACM IMWUT, 2024. [ Paper PDF ]

[IPSN24] L. Duan, Y. Chen, Z. Qu, M. McGrath, E. Ehmke, M. Gorlatova, BiGuide: A Bi-Level Data Acquisition Guidance for Object Detection on Mobile Devices, in Proc. ACM/IEEE IPSN, Hong Kong, China, May 2024. (21.5% acceptance rate). [ Paper PDF ] [ GitHub repo ]

[ICRA24] L. Duan, Y. Chen, T. Scargill, M. Gorlatova, 3D Object Detection with VI-SLAM Point Clouds: The Impact of Object and Environment Characteristics on Model Performance, in Proc. IEEE ICRA’24, Yokohama, Japan, May 2024. [ Paper PDF ] [ GitHub repo ]

[NeurosurgicalFocus24] S. Eom, T. Ma, N. Vutakuri, T. Hu, A. P. Haskell-Mendoza, D. W. Sykes, M. Gorlatova, J. Jackson. Mixed Reality-guided Twist-drill Craniostomy Improves the Accuracy of External Ventricular Drain Placement. Neurosurgical Focus, special issue on Mixed Reality in Neurosurgery. Vol. 56, No. 1, Jan. 2024. [ Paper PDF ]

[ISMAR23] T. Scargill, Y. Chen, T. Hu, M. Gorlatova, SiTAR: Situated Trajectory Analysis for In-the-Wild Pose Error Estimation, in Proc. IEEE ISMAR’23, Sydney, Australia, Oct. 2023. [ Paper PDF ]  [ GitHub repo ]

[INFOCOM23] Y. Chen, H. Inaltekin, M. Gorlatova, AdaptSLAM: Edge-assisted Adaptive SLAM with Resource Constraints via Uncertainty Minimization, in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM’23, Jersey City, NJ, May 2023. (19.2% acceptance rate).  [ Paper PDF ] [ GitHub repo ]

[ISMAR22a] S. Eom, D. Sykes, S. Rahimpour, M. Gorlatova, NeuroLens: Augmented Reality-based Contextual Guidance through Surgical Tool Tracking in Neurosurgery, in Proc. IEEE ISMAR, Oct. 2022 (21% acceptance rate). [ Paper PDF ]

[IPSN22] G. Lan, T. Scargill, M. Gorlatova, EyeSyn: Psychology-inspired Eye Movement Synthesis for Gaze-based Activity Recognition, in Proc. IEEE/ACM IPSN’22, May 2022. [PDF] [Accompanying demonstration] [ GitHub repo ] [NSF Discoveries news item about this work] Highlighted in the university-wide Duke Daily and in the NSF-wide Discoveries newsletters. 

[IPSN20] Z. Liu, G. Lan, J. Stojkovic, Y. Zhang, C. Joe-Wong, M. Gorlatova, CollabAR: Edge-assisted Collaborative Image Recognition for Mobile Augmented Reality, in Proc. IEEE IPSN’20, April 2020 (21.7% acceptance rate). [ Paper PDF ] [ GitHub repo ] [ Blog post ] IEEE IPSN Best Research Artifact Award.

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