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Shwetak Patel

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Citizenship
  
United States

Doctoral advisor
  
Gregory Abowd

Role
  
Computer scientist

Name
  
Shwetak Patel

Nationality
  
American


Shwetak Patel httpsuploadwikimediaorgwikipediacommonsthu

Born
  
December 9, 1981 Selma, Alabama, USA (
1981-12-09
)

Residence
  
Seattle, Washington, USA

Institutions
  
University of Washington, Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering

Alma mater
  
Georgia Institute of Technology

Known for
  
Sensing, sustainability, ubiquitous computing, energy sensing

Books
  
Infrastructure Mediated Sensing

Education
  
Georgia Institute of Technology, Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School

Awards
  
MacArthur Fellowship, TR35

Fields
  
Human–computer interaction, Ubiquitous computing, Embedded system

Doctoral students
  
Erik Larson, Sidhant Gupta

Sensor technologist computer scientist shwetak patel 2011 macarthur fellow macarthur foundation


Shwetak Naran Patel is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur best known for his work on developing novel sensing solutions and ubiquitous computing. He is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor at the University of Washington in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering, where he joined in 2008. His technology start-up company on energy sensing, Zensi, was acquired by Belkin International, Inc. in 2010. He was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.

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Shwetak Patel Shwetak Patel MacArthur Foundation

Computer scientist shwetak patel sciencelives


Personal life

Shwetak Patel Shwetak Patel MacArthur Foundation

Shwetak Patel was born on December 9, 1981 in Selma, Alabama, though he was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. He attended Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School for high school in Birmingham, graduating in 2000. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003, and then continued on to receive his Ph.D. in computer science in 2008 under the advisement of Dr. Gregory Abowd. He started as an assistant professor at the University of Washington in 2008, where he remains today. In July 2013, he was promoted to associate professor, and then in July 2014 was named the Washington Research Foundation Endowed Professor.

Patel is married to Dr. Julie Kientz, who is also a faculty member at the University of Washington, and lives in Seattle, Washington.

Professional career

Patel’s research is broadly in the areas of ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, and user interface software and technology. He has published over 50 articles since 2003 and has received numerous best paper awards. Patel focuses on developing easy-to-deploy sensing technologies, activity recognition, and applications for energy monitoring. He also has developed novel interaction techniques for mobile devices, mobile sensing systems, and wireless sensor platforms, many of which in collaboration with Microsoft Research, where is also a visiting researcher. Dr. Patel's primary research has been in building low-cost and easy-to-deploy sensing systems, which he calls Infrastructure Mediated Sensing. These approaches leverage utility infrastructures in a home to support whole-house sensing.

Patel co-founded a company called Zensi, Inc., while he was a graduate student at Georgia Tech. Zensi was a demand-side energy monitoring solutions provider. In 2010, Zensi was acquired by Belkin, Inc in 2010 for an undisclosed sum. This acquisition resulted in numerous awards for Patel, including making the cover of Seattle Business magazine, newsmaker of the year by TechFlash, and was named one of the top 10 start up stories of 2010 by TechFlash.

Dr. Patel has also received international recognition for his work, including the MacArthur Fellowship in 2011, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 award in 2009, the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship in 2011, the 2011 India Abroad Face of the Future award, and the Sloan Fellowship in 2012. His work was featured in the cover story of Wired Magazine, and his past work on camera blocking technology was also honored by the New York Times as a top technology of the year in 2005. He also has numerous other articles appearing in the popular media on his inventions. In 2017 he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

References

Shwetak Patel Wikipedia