About Me

Working on exciting research projects with some great collaborators, I am set on a path to do what I like most; building things, bricking things, and tinkering with some other things! As a part of the Networking Research Group and Research for Industry at MSR, I work on cutting-edge research to address global challenges in sustainability, agriculture and the environment. I am also part of the Urban Innovation Initiative, where I work with a team of experts on Project Eclipse to bring granular air quality sensing to cities and people around the world.

If you have exciting ideas and would like to chat, you can email me at vnattar@microsoft.com

Recent Updates

• Co-organizing the 2nd AgSys workshop as a part of MobiCom 2023. Workshop link here Please sumit your work on Tech in Agriculture, Food and sustainability. We look forward to meeting the participants in person at MobiCom!
• Summer internship posting open for Networking Research Group at MSR. Apply here and email me if you work on low-power wireless communication and sensing applications and are interested in a summer internship - November 2022
• Co-chaired the first workshop on Agri Food Systems (AgSys) as a part of SenSys ‘22. The workshop was a success thanks to exciting submissions, keynote speakers (Digital Green and Strella Biotech) and, panelists - November 2022
• Appointed as Affiliate Asst. Professor at ECE, UW - July 2022
• Check out our submission “Re-Inventing the Food Supply Chain with IoT: A Data-Driven Solution to Reduce Food Loss”, at IEEE IoT Magazine. The article speaks about our research efforts in addressing challenges in the global food supply chain - March 2022

Research at Microsoft

FoodVibes

Through the FoodVibes, we hope to address the global food challenge by developing and deploying affordable technology that helps reduce waste and optimize production. Starting from the Farms, we focus on production, harvest and post-harvest food supply chain. As a part of the larger team, I lead the efforts at using IoT and Wireless technology to provide solutions that sense and connect the entire food supply chain. Read more about the larger project FarmVibes and our work on FoodVibes.

Project Eclipse

Pollution is something most residents of cities experience regularly, but few cities have the tools to track pollution in real-time or at the neighborhood scale. Through Project Eclipse, we bring hyperlocal air quality sensing to cities across the US, create awareness of local air quality and help understand its impact on the local communities. As a part of the interdisciplinary team, I helped design, calibrate and deploy the air quality sensors. You can learn more about Project Eclipse and our publication on Eclipse, an end-to-end platform

Battery-Free Sensing

As a summer intern in the Medical Devices Group at MSR in 2016 I developed a fully-analog wearable passive sensor for continuous physiological monitoring. I returned to work with the group in late 2017 to work on further integration of the system to an existing sensor framework and to validate it with testing. The vision for this work is to develop a bandaid-like device that can be worn on the body for bed-side monitoring of heart rate, breathing rate, temperature and audio. The device was also designed for sensor input flexibility as a plug-and-play platform that interfaces with different types of sensors. The prototype device performs sensing and communicates sensed signals at 35 to 160 micro Watts power budget (harvested from a 915MHz radio frequency continuous wave singal). Here is a link to the paper "RF Bandaid: A Fully-Analog and Passive Wireless Interface for Wearable Sensors". this work received the distinguished paper award at Ubicomp 2019.

• Together with Jingxian Wang in 2020, I explored temperature sensing applications using battery-less tags and developed "ultralow-latency localization using the RFbandaid platform". This work demonstrates sub-centimetter location tracking at sub-millisecond latency.
• As a part of a collaboration with UpsalaUniversity in 2021 we created a novel " beat frequency-based identification method for analog tags".

Brain-Computer-Spinal Interface

I graduated with a Ph.D. from the Sensor Systems Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. My research interests involve developing low-power and wireless sensing systems for healthcare, environment and IoT applications. Specifically, I have worked on HF near-field and UHF far-field wireless energy harvesting, ultra-low-power wireless communication and computation for implantable and wearable devices. Here is my dissertation document if you want to learn more about the work. The modular neural interface device NeuralCLIP which was developed as a part of this project was awarded the Madrona prize runner up in 2018. Title: Implantable Wireless Brain-Computer Interface.