Shyam Gollakota, a University of Washington computer science professor and Seattle-based health tech startup founder, won a $100,000 award as one of six researchers honored as part of this year’s Infosys Prize.
The annual award is organized by the Infosys Science Foundation, a charitable arm of Indian multinational company Infosys.
Gollakota won this year’s prize for engineering and computer science.
“This was surprising since I did not know I was on their radar,” Gollakota told GeekWire.
Gollakota’s research spans a variety of areas, including wireless tech, battery-free devices, WiFi sensing and imaging, medical diagnostics via smartphones, and more. He leads the Mobile Intelligence Lab at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Gollakota co-founded Sound Life Sciences, a UW spinout that developed an app to monitor breathing that was acquired by Google in 2022.
He’s also the co-founder of Wavely Diagnostics, which uses a smartphone app to detect ear infections.
More recently Gollakota has been leading research on a headphone prototype that uses AI to create a “sound bubble” and can learn the distance for each sound source in a room. He said he’ll use his award money from the Infosys Prize to help commercialize the technology.
“I do think this prize supports our work on creating a symbiosis between humans, hardware, and AI to create superhuman capabilities like sound bubbles, with the potential to transform billions of headphones, AirPods, and improve the lives of millions of people who have hearing loss,” Gollakota said.
The Infosys Prize, launched in 2008, goes to Indian researchers and innovators in fields including economics, engineering & computer science, humanities & social science, life sciences, mathematical sciences, and physical sciences. Those based outside of India are required to spend 30 days at a host institute in India.
The only previous U.S. recipient of the award for computer science was Hari Balakrishnan in 2020.
This year year the Infosys Prize began limiting winners to 40 years of age.
Gollakota recently spoke on the Shift AI podcast, which you can check out below.
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