(03/2021) Prof. Hester won the highly competitive 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award! (02/2021) We begin our NSF funded CIVIC project collaborating with Ojibwe nations. (02/2021) Our work on automated N95 decontamination is featured on ACM Tech News. (12/2020) Intermittent computing on Seeker’s Focal Point Series, highlights the Battery-free Game Boy! (11/2020) Northwestern Now and Seeker covered Prof. Hester for Native American Heritage Month. (11/2020) Best Poster Award Runner up for our N95 Decontamination work at ACM SenSys 2020! (10/2020) The Wall Street Journal covered perpetual computing and the Battery-free Game Boy! (09/2020) Interviewed on BBC’s Newsday on the Game Boy! (segment starts at 18:40) (09/2020) Major press coverage for Battery-free Game Boy on CNET, BBC, The Verge, Hackaday. (09/2020) Battery-free Game Boy won Best Presentation Award at ACM UbiComp 2020! (09/2020) NSF CISE funds our CPS Medium proposal on building smart green infrastructure! (08/2020) Battery-free Game Boy accepted to IMWUT/ACM UbiComp 2020, you can learn more here! (06/2020) Wrote a viewpoint article for Communications of the ACM on IoT security and privacy. (05/2020) NSF CISE funds Prof. Hester’s RAPID proposal on smart personal protective equipment! (04/2020) Paper on wearable automated eating detection accepted to ACM IMWUT/UbiComp 2020! (11/2019) Two full papers on intermittent computing accepted to ACM ASPLOS 2020! (09/2019) Wrote a feature for ACM XRDS Magazine on battery-free mobile computing. (08/2019) Two full papers accepted to ACM UbiComp’19 and ACM MobiCom’19! (07/2019) Prof Hester gives keynote lecture at WearSys in Seoul on future wearables. (06/2019) NSF CISE funds Prof. Hester’s proposal on privacy enhanced egocentric cameras! (05/2019) NSF ECCS funds Prof. Hester’s proposal for durable, conformable, pressure sensitive surfaces! (02/2019) NSF CISE funds Prof. Hester’s CRII proposal for Adaptive Intermittent Computing!
Josiah Hester is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. Josiah joined Northwestern in 2017 after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Clemson University. His work has received a Best Paper Award and Best Paper Nomination from ACM SenSys, the top conference on wireless sensors networks, and two Best Poster Awards. He was also named the Outstanding Ph.D. Student in Computer Science for 2016 by the School of Computing at Clemson University. He has served as a reviewer for many top venues, including ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, PACM IMWUT / UbiComp, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. A Native Hawaiian, he is interested in increasing participation in STEM disciplines for Native and original peoples of the USA, especially at the graduate level.
We hold the vision that the untethered computing devices—wearables, implantables, energy harvesting sensors—hold significant promise for revolutionizing global scale applications across healthcare, environmental stewardship, infrastructure management, and space exploration.
Our research is concerned with the underlying computer systems principles, human factors, and behavioral issues that arise by bringing this vision to reality. We explore and develop radically new hardware designs, software techniques, tools, and programming abstractions so that developers can easily design, debug, and deploy intricate energy aware applications that work in spite of frequent power failures, constrained resources, and unpredictable conditions.
Research Approach: We build fully integrated, end-to-end computer systems to demonstrate the efficacy of the underlying scientific advancement we are concerned with. We run physical experiments to validate our hypothesis on hard benchmarks. We run user studies in the wild to test our sensing technologies, gathering quantitative and qualitative results that inform future work and guard against failures.
Venue Video Info Best Presentation Award Runner Up – Audience Choice
Our lab is always looking for highly motivated, extremely curious students, with interesting and diverse backgrounds. After reading some of our papers, and looking at some of our projects, where do you see yourself?
If you are any of these people, we might be interested in working with you as a graduate, or undergraduate student.
Before you contact us, It is highly recommended you read this advice , and this advice. Make sure to apply to Northwestern Engineering, and we can talk about working together. If you are already at Northwestern as an undergraduate or graduate student, email Prof Hester to schedule a time to talk in his office.
Prof Hester (a Native Hawaiian) is especially interested in engaging Native and Indigenous students and researchers in Computer Science and Engineering. Please reach out.
Fill out this form if you are interested in working with us.
Battery-free, interactive devices for a sustainable IoT.
Architecture, hardware, languages, and tools, for energy harvesting, intermittently powered computing devices.
Batteryless devices for smart personal protection
We explore wearable computational methods to reduce the effect of structural, societal, monetary, or mental barriers to receiving healthcare treatment.
Architecture, languages, and tools, for spintronic computing devices.
Our lab is generously funded by the National Science Foundation under multiple awards (CNS-2038853, CNS-2032408, CNS-1850496, CNS-1915847, ECCS-1912694, EECS-2030251, CNS-2044053), the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and 3M.