SYNERGY - Key Persons

Yuvraj Agarwal is a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, and the director of SynergyLabs @ CMU . He is affiliated with the Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), and ECE (by courtesy) at CMU. His lab focuses on research at the intersection of hardware and software systems, and in the recent past his group has focused on energy efficiency, security and privacy as a central research theme. In additional to publications at competitive conferences (MobiSys, Ubicomp, SenSys, IPSN, NSDI, USENIX, Oakland, BuildSys, CHI), SynergyLab specifically strives to build and deploy systems that have real world impact and benefit society. His group leads research around smart buildings, systems for the Internet-of-Things (IoT), privacy and security, and have also had significant impact in mobile computing and energy efficient computing. Several of the systems that Yuvraj and his students have built have been deployed at scale on the UCSD and CMU campuses. The systems that he has built for studying privacy on mobile platforms have been used by hundreds of thousands of users and have had significant industrial impact. Yuvraj is a member of the IEEE, ACM and USENIX. Personal I grew up in Kanpur, India. My long and arduos educational journey started at Little Folks pre-school, where I spent all my time apparently having fun with friends, and according to my teachers learning the unique skill of "being able to distract the entire class, so as to prevent anyone from doing any useful work". After graduating from Little Folks, I went off to Seth Anandram Jaipuria School, also in Kanpur for Grade I to XII. Next stopover was Pune for my Bachelor's degree. I came to the US to do my M.S. at UC Irvine, and then onto a PhD from UC San Diego in beautiful La Jolla. My father is one of the best engineers I know of. He has the unique honor of going from fixing turntables with cycle tire tubes and random electronic parts when he was a kid, to doing the acoustic modeling of Royce Hall at UCLA for his thesis, working with Robert Altman when Lionsgate Films was less than a dozen people and most importantly following his dream of building a successfull professional audio company (Electro Dynamics, India) from scratch together with my superhuman mom! I am convinced that my mom could do anything that she puts her mind to, including run our family business with my father without having an Engineering degree while raising us! My amazing wife, Gunjan, who I met at UCSD, is not not only a fantastic cook who loves to write poetry but is also a Bio-Engineer by training and an attorney after completing her J.D. degree. Gunjan is a Partner at Fox Rothschild LLP focusing on Intellectual Propery matters. My brother, Gautam, finished his M.S. and MBA from UCLA and after more than a decade at PwC joined Navy Federal Credit Union as the VP of Lending Analytics. We now have two wonderful little children, Vihaan and Ayaansh, who have changed our life forever since they came into our lives. There is not a single dull moment with them around! I am indeed fortunate to have such a wonderful family! Yuvraj Agarwal is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science, within the Institute for Software Research, at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are at the intersection of Systems and Networking and Embedded Systems, and he is particularly excited about research problems that benefit from using hardware insights to build more scalable and energy efficient systems. In recent years, his work has focused on Green Computing, Mobile Computing and Energy Efficient Buildings. Agarwal has a BE in Electrical Engineering from Pune University in India, an MS in Information and Computer Science from University of California at Irvine, and a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of California at San Diego. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM and USENIX.