About
I am a Lisa Wissner-Slivka & Benjamin Slivka Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Northwestern University where I direct the Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing & Experiences (SPICE) Lab . I received my Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University in 2023 and B.Tech. in Computer Science in 2017. I am a recipient of the Forbes 30 under 30, MIT 35 innovators under 35 Asia Pacific, and ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award. I have recently been a Visiting Research Scientist at Google leading efforts on Augmented Reality and Experiences, and have previously worked at Apple, Microsoft Research, Meta Reality Labs and IBM Research.
My research group creates cutting-edge computing technologies that sense, track, and understand humans to augment their interactions and assist them in daily life. We tackle challenging research problems in high-impact application areas such as mobile health sensing, extended reality, embodied perception and natural user interfaces. We leverage expertise in novel sensors & sensing techniques, embedded systems, multimodal learning, computer vision, and on-device machine learning to deploy and evaluate these technologies in real-world settings. Many of our projects have been open-sourced, deployed in the wild, licensed, shipped as product features (including features used by over 10 million users) and have influenced flagship products at leading companies like Google and Apple.
Prospective students: I am hiring at all levels (post-docs, PhDs, masters, undergrads, and visitors); please fill in this form if you are interested in joining the lab.
Selected Research
I publish my research at premiere venues in computer science. Click on the details button to open the project-specific webpage to access supporting materials. For a full list of my patents and publications, please download my CV.
OptiDwell: Intelligent Adjustment of Dwell Click Time
Anand Nayyar, Utkarsh Dwivedi, Karan Ahuja, Nitendra Rajput, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey. IUI 2017
Convolutional Neural Networks for Ocular Smartphone-Based Biometrics
Karan Ahuja, Rahul Islam, Ferdous Barbhuiya, Kuntal Dey. PRL 2017
Eye center localization and detection using radial mapping
Karan Ahuja, Ruchika Banarjee, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey, Ferdous Barbhuiya. ICIP 2016