Sustainable Ambient Intelligence: Rethinking Perception and Computation in Everything Around Us

We are moving towards a future where intelligence is embedded into everything around us, operating autonomously for years on harvested energy. However, realizing this vision faces fundamental challenges in overcoming physics bottlenecks of miniaturized sensing, scaling intelligence across large deployments, and doing so in a sustainable way. In this talk, I will present my research in reimagining computing from first principles to enable sustainable ambient intelligence at an entirely new level of granularity. First, I will demonstrate how reframing spatial sensing as a learning problem enables detail perception at a fraction of resources - from sound-localization in centimeter-scale devices to depth perception for insect-scale robots using metamaterial-based frontends. Then, I will present a real-time battery-free localization system that achieves GPS-like accuracy while consuming thousands of times less power, capable of tracking millions of micro-assets across cities by leveraging non-linearity and next-G cellular infrastructure. I will conclude this talk with a glimpse of my ongoing and future projects exploring spatial intelligence in LLMs, quantum-sensing architectures, and digital twins for healthcare.

Speaker: Nakul Garg, University of Maryland