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 ]

NEW September 2023: 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

11/15/2023: Paper led by Sarah Eom titled “Mixed Reality-guided Twist-drill Craniostomy Improves the Accuracy of External Ventricular Drain Placement” has been accepted to Neurosurgery Focus special issue on mixed reality in neurosurgery.

11/10/2023: Prof. Gorlatova gave an invited CMU ECE Graduate Seminar talk. Thanks to Carlee Joe-Wong for hosting!

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.”

10/9/2023: Heartfelt congratulations to Tim Scargill on his ACM ImmerCom Best Paper Award! [ Paper PDF ]

9/28/2023: Prof. Gorlatova gave a GVU Brown Bag seminar at Georgia Tech. Thanks to Josiah Hester for hosting! [ Presentation PDF ]

9/27/2023: Prof. Gorlatova was the inaugural speaker of the Duke University Computational Medicine seminar series. Thanks to Amanda Randles for invitation and her leadership of this new seminar.

9/26/2023: Prof. Gorlatova gave a departmental seminar in the CS Dept. at UNC Chapel Hill. Thanks to Shahriar Nirjon for hosting!

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.

9/1/2023: Our work on reference-free AR QoS metrics and their applications will be appearing at IEEE ISMAR in October 2023: SiTAR: Situated Trajectory Analysis for In-the-Wild Pose Error Estimation. [ GitHub repo ]

8/31/2023: Professor Gorlatova and PhD student Ying Chen are invited to attend the 2023 Google Networking Research Summit in Sunnyvale, CA.

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.

8/8/2023: We are presenting a workshop paper titled Invisible Textures: Comparing Machine and Human Perception of Environment Texture for Augmented Reality and a demo titled DNN-based SLAM Tracking Error Online Estimation at ACM MobiCom 2023.

7/10/2023: Our work on augmented reality for retinal laser therapy is profiled in the Duke Eye Center VISION Magazine. [ More information ]

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

[ToAppearNeurosurgicalFocus24] 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. To appear in Neurosurgical Focus, special issue on Mixed Reality in Neurosurgery. Accepted Oct. 2023.

[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. [ Preprint 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.

[Sigmetrics14] M. Gorlatova, J. Sarik, G. Grebla, M. Cong, I. Kymissis, G. Zussman, Movers and Shakers: Kinetic Energy Harvesting for the Internet of Things, in Proc. ACM SIGMETRICS’14, Austin, TX, July 2014 (~17% acceptance rate). [Paper PDF]
Selected media coverage: MIT Technology Review Physics ArXiv blog, MIT Technology Review Business Report.

[TMC13] M. Gorlatova, A. Wallwater, G. Zussman, Networking Low-Power Energy Harvesting Devices: Measurements and Algorithms, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 12, no. 9, Sept. 2013. [Paper PDF]
Winner: 2016 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award. [Award info]

[WirComm10] M. Gorlatova, P. Kinget, I. Kymissis, D. Rubenstein, X. Wang, G. Zussman, Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags for Ubiquitous Object Networking, IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, vol. 17, no 6, pp. 18-25, Dec. 2010.
Winner: 2011 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications.  [Paper PDF] [Award info]

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