Hey! I'm Alex

I’m a fourth(!) year CSE PhD student at UCSD advised by Pat Pannuto. I'm interested in deployable, wide-area sensing systems that can monitor or improve our existing infrastructures to benefit societal functionality. More recently, I have been exploring ways to utilize our existing, physical infrastructures (e.g. vehicles, smartphones) to expand our capabilities of empowering the Internet of Everything. I currently lead two projects:

• Lights, Camera, Grid!
Electricity powers our everyday appliances but can oftentimes be unreliable, particularly in rural areas and developing countries. However, we can attempt to capture nuances in our electricity quality with the knowledge that our electricity powers visible lights too—namely street lights and house lights—such that we can quantize and analyze the light emitted by visible lights. Our vision is to enable autonomous monitoring of the electic grid by imaging these visible lights with commodity cameras, eventually allowing centralized entities to monitor electricity and respond to grid faults more efficiently and effectively. (Fun fact: I continued this project from undergrad and still work with Jay!)
• LoRa Analysis (via Helium)
Helium (recently rebranded to Nova Labs) is the reason that there are about one million LoRa gateways spread across the world. This provides an opportunity to analyze LoRa in ways that would usually require a single person (or group of people) to set up many gateways themselves.

Before coming to UCSD, I completed my bachelors degree in Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst, where I worked with Jay Taneja. I am also fortunate to be supported by the NSF through the Graduate Reserach Fellowship and would be happy to share my advice with others!

In my spare time, I enjoy cooking, listening to music, playing tennis, climbing, writing, and meeting new people (definitely say hi and chat with me if you see me)! I've also been picking up Mandarin (again) in my free time and would love to talk with others more :)