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 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, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE ICNP, ACM SIGCOMM, and ACM/IEEE IPSN. I have chaired the TPC of the Edge Computing track of IEEE ICDCS and am chairing the 2023 ACM/IEEE IPSN TPC.

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 ]

 Recent News and News Highlights

5/18/2023: The lab has had an exciting end of the Spring 2023 semester, with multiple recognitions of the outstanding work of the students [ More information ]

4/26/2023: Ying Chen has been selected to attend the 2023 CPS Rising Stars Workshop at the University of Virginia. Congratulations, Ying! Ying’s recent work is appearing at IEEE INFOCOM’23 [ Paper PDF ][ More information ] [ Accompanying demonstration ] and is being demonstrated at ACM/IEEE IPSN’23 [Demo abstract PDF].

4/11/2023: Mallesh Dasari, Junchen Jiang, and myself are organizing the 2023 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Emerging Multimedia Systems. We welcome submissions on multiple elements of network and systems support for AR, VR, point cloud generation and streaming, generative AI, and much more. Deadline June 12th.

3/30/2023: We are presenting two demonstrations at the 2023 CPS-IoT week (ACM/IEEE IPSN) demo session: Lin Duan will present BiGuide: A Bi-Level Data Acquisition Guidance for Object Detection on Mobile Devices [Demo abstract PDF], and Sarah Eom will present Edge-based Augmented Reality Guidance System for Retinal Laser Therapy [Demo abstract PDF].

3/24/2023: Our upcoming invited book chapter of the Springer Handbook of the Metaverse outlines how the IoT will help make augmented reality context-aware, and discusses related challenges and research directions [ Book chapter PDF ]

3/8/2023: We are thrilled to be supported by CISCO via a CISCO Research Award for a project titled Enabling Multi-user Markerless Augmented Reality via Reinforcement Learning on Mobile Devices and the Edge, which we are working on jointly with our long-term collaborator Carlee Joe-Wong.

2/2/2023: Sarah Eom received the Duke University Eye Center Research to Prevent Blindness Small Grant Award to further develop her work on augmented reality for eye surgery. Sarah will give a poster presentation about this work at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. Joint work with Miroslav Pajic (Duke ECE) and Majda Hadziahmetovic (Duke Ophthalmology).

10/28/2022: I3T Lab projects are featured in the 2022 Duke ECE Magazine cover story “The Dawning of the Age of the Metaverse.”

9/16/2022: Congratulations to Tim Scargill, Alex Xu, and Achilles Dabrowski on their ACM UbiComp’22 Best Poster Award! Both Alex and Achilles have completed multiple semesters of independent studies in the I3T Lab under Tim’s guidance. It is wonderful to have this recognition of their hard work and Tim’s dedicated mentorship. [ Poster submission  ] [ Poster presented at the conference ] [ More information ]

8/19/2022: We are delighted to be supported by NASA via a Phase I STTR project led by Nanohmics, Inc, titled “Demonstration of Space-Qualified Environmental Evaluation Drones with Wireless Intelligent Networked Data Processing (SPEEDWINDs).”

7/02/2022: Professor Gorlatova gave a keynote titled “Intelligent Mobile Augmented Reality: Promise, Challenges, and Solutions” at the ACM EMDL Workshop co-located with ACM MobiSys’22. [ Keynote slides PDF ]

6/17/2022: Professor Gorlatova is thrilled to be co-chairing the TPC of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023.

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

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

[INFOCOM23Demo] Y. Chen, H. Inaltekin, J. Sarik, M. Gorlatova, Demo: Demonstrating Resource-Efficient SLAM in Virtual Spacecraft Environments, to appear in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM’23, Jersey City, NJ, May 2023. [Demo abstract PDF]

[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 ]

[ISMAR22b] T. Scargill, Y. Chen, N. Marzen, M. Gorlatova, Integrated Design of Augmented Reality Spaces Using Virtual Environments, in Proc. IEEE ISMAR, Oct. 2022 (21% acceptance rate).  [ Paper PDF ]

[IMWUT22] Y. Zhang, T. Scargill, A. Vaishnav, G. Premsankar, M. Di Francesco, M. Gorlatova, InDepth: Real-time Depth Inpainting for Mobile Augmented Reality, in Proc. ACM IMWUT’22, Cambridge, UK, Sept. 2022 [Paper PDF] [ Presentation PDF ]

[UbiComp22Poster] T. Scargill, A. Dabrowski, A. Xu, M. Gorlatova, Poster: IoT-Enabled Environment Illuminance Optimization for Augmented Reality, in Proc. ACM UbiComp’22, Cambridge, UK, Sept. 2022. [ Poster PDF ] ACM UbiComp’22 Best Poster Award.

[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] [Code and data] [NSF Discoveries news item about this work] Highlighted in the university-wide Duke Daily and in the NSF-wide Discoveries newsletters. 

[INFOCOM22] Y. Chen, H. Kwon, H. Inaltekin, M. Gorlatova, VR Viewport Pose Model for Quantifying and Exploiting Frame Correlations, in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM’22, May 2022 (19.9% acceptance rate). [PDF] [Code and data] [Accompanying demonstration PDF] [Video of the accompanying demonstration]

[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 ] [ Dataset and codebase ] [ 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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