About

About Me

I am a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, advised by Prof. Dinesh Bharadia in the Wireless Communication, Sensing and Networking Group (WCSNG). I build wireless, battery-free sensing systems: RFID tags and algorithms that read force, light, and soil-moisture sensors in real time, without batteries. This work has earned a Best Paper Award at IEEE RFID 2025 and two Best Demo Runner-Up awards (ACM MobiCom ‘24 and ACM SenSys ‘25).

Before my PhD, I spent three and a half years at Cisco Systems as a software developer, building install and upgrade software for Cisco HyperFlex and test automation for Cisco Intersight in Scala, Go, Python, and Kubernetes. I am interested in wireless sensing, systems, and high-performance and ML systems.

Download my resume (PDF)

Highlights

• 2026: Led my team to win the ARA Hackathon (Arathon) at the NSF AgRuralG Workshop, AgWireless ‘26, Ames, Iowa.
• 2025: TuneTag published in the IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification.
• 2025: Best Paper Award at IEEE RFID 2025 for SenSync.
• 2025: Best Demo Runner-Up at ACM SenSys ‘25 for SIGAR.
• 2025: Started my PhD at UC San Diego with the Centaur Graduate Student Fellowship.
• 2024: Best Demo Runner-Up at ACM MobiCom ‘24 for ZenseTag.

Education

University of California San Diego: PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering (Computer Engineering)
July 2025 – Present

University of California San Diego: MS, Electrical and Computer Engineering (Computer Engineering)
September 2023 – June 2025

Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani: BE, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Minor in Finance
August 2016 – June 2020

Research

Wireless and Battery-Free Universal Sensing Platform (Patent Pending)

April 2024 – Present

• Built SenSync, a time-alignment and phase-correction algorithm for RFID sensing that improves sensory resolution 5x, with a 0.79° median phase error.
• Designed TuneTag, an impedance-matched sensing tag with 5x sensing accuracy, 2.4x range, and 5x faster, sub-second response compared with the state of the art.
• Co-developed ZenseTag, a 15x10 mm flexible passive tag that reads force, soil-moisture, and light sensors, with 93%+ soil-moisture classification accuracy.
• Developed an Augmented Reality smartphone app that automatically detects sensors and overlays their real-time readings on a live camera feed.
• Raised RFID read throughput 8x with a custom data-collection platform on the Impinj Octane SDK.
• Earned all 5 ACM artifact evaluation badges (available, functional, reusable, reproduced, replicated) for ZenseTag at SenSys ‘24.

Publications

PDFs, slides, and posters for each paper are on the Publications page.

• I. Bansal, N. Bhat, H. Govindarajan, A. Gupta, and D. Bharadia, “TuneTag: Impedance-Matched RFID Tag for Long-Range and Reliable Battery-Free Sensing,” IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, vol. 9, 2025.
• I. Bansal, N. Bhat, A. Gupta, H. Govindarajan, and D. Bharadia, “SenSync: Real-Time and Accurate Passive Sensing,” 2025 IEEE International Conference on RFID (IEEE RFID ‘25), Atlanta, GA, USA, pp. 1–6. Best Paper Award.
• N. Bhat, A. Gupta, I. Bansal, H. Govindarajan, and D. Bharadia, “ZenseTag: An RFID assisted Twin-Tag Single Antenna COTS Sensor Interface,” Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys ‘24), pp. 336–350.
• I. Bansal et al., “Demo - SIGAR: Sensor Integration Gateway using Augmented Reality,” Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys ‘25), pp. 696–697. Best Demo Runner-Up.
• I. Bansal et al., “Demo - ZenseTag: Real-Time Passive RFID Sensing,” Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom ‘24), pp. 1757–1759. Best Demo Runner-Up.

Honors & Awards

• Winner, ARA Hackathon (Arathon) at the NSF AgRuralG Workshop (AgWireless ‘26), for rural cellular infrastructure placement, 2026.
• Best Paper Award, IEEE RFID 2025, for SenSync, 2025.
• Best Demo Runner-Up, ACM SenSys 2025 (SIGAR) and ACM MobiCom 2024 (ZenseTag).
• Centaur Graduate Student Fellowship, UC San Diego, 2025.
• Employee of the Quarter, Cisco Systems, for exceptional contributions to new feature development, Q1 FY2021.

Professional Experience

Senior Software Developer | Cisco Systems | Bangalore, India

January 2020 – July 2023

• Built install and upgrade software for Cisco HyperFlex in Scala, Go, and Python, managing public and private cloud infrastructure.
• Owned the security and user-experience features of the HyperFlex upgrade software end to end.
• Mentored 3+ engineers, including junior developers and newly hired senior engineers.
• Cut HyperFlex upgrade time by 22% by optimizing the upgrade software architecture.
• Resolved 93% of assigned defects, cutting upgrade-software bugs by 70% and improving cluster lifecycle management.
• Improved deployment efficiency by 25% by adopting infrastructure as code with Terraform and Ansible.
• Embedded automated testing and continuous monitoring in DevOps pipelines, enabling rapid and reliable software releases.
• Engineered automation tools to manage test scripts and test statistics for Intersight, a cloud-operated infrastructure management platform.
• Orchestrated containerized core infrastructure for Intersight on Kubernetes, improving scalability, efficiency, and resilience.
• Saved the QA team 100 work hours per week by automating test-script review with a tool integrated into the CI/CD pipeline.
• Added real-time monitoring and alerting to the CI/CD pipeline with Elasticsearch, Grafana, and Kibana, enabling proactive issue resolution.
• Designed a web application that tracks verification activities for hundreds of Kubernetes-orchestrated containerized microservices.
• Automated detection of security vulnerabilities and user-experience flaws, saving the QA team 50 work hours per week.
• Launched a chatbot for real-time reporting of ongoing and past verification activities, cutting team-wide data retrieval by 40 work hours per week.

Internships

Summer Intern | Peco Pallet Inc | New York, NY

June 2024 – September 2024

• Built a Python and Excel pipeline for data cleaning, geocoding, and reporting on large corporate datasets.
• Engineered a one-click tool that analyzes large datasets and generates custom reports to estimate optimal pricing strategies.
• Improved data quality and cut data-management effort by 70% by building the application in-house.
• Sped up pricing delivery by 40%, increasing the probability of conversion by 25%.

Summer Intern | Western Digital | Bangalore, India

May 2019 – July 2019

• Built a functional code-coverage tool for firmware verification of removable flash-based storage devices.
• Designed a compact data structure and algorithm to compute and store coverage results within a 50 kB on-disk budget.
• Added a user-friendly interface that displays results and suggests actions to improve test coverage.
• Saved an estimated US$50,000 annually by building the tool in-house.

Research Intern | Indian Meteorological Department | Pune, India

May 2018 – July 2018

• Led a 4-person team building an end-to-end meteorological sensor data-collection system.
• Developed an IoT system that streams real-time data from an Automatic Weather Station to a mobile app.
• Designed a primary-secondary topology using Raspberry Pi and Arduino Nano boards, with embedded C sensor interfaces and Python streaming to a cloud server.
• Integrated temperature, humidity, wind, rainfall, and soil-moisture sensors over I2C, UART, and RS-485.
• Achieved 100% uptime in harsh, unsupervised environments with LTE, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet connectivity.
• Cut system cost by 90% through in-house development.

Projects

Data-Driven Rural Infrastructure Placement (ARA Hackathon Winner)

August 2026

• Led a team to first place in the ARA Hackathon (Arathon Challenge 3) at AgWireless ‘26, Ames, Iowa.
• Predicted cellular coverage across a 178 km² rural area from 7,144 drive-test measurements covering only 7% of it.
• Identified a single macro-site placement raising coverage from 44% to 69% of route-km and from 37% to 59% of area.
• Outperformed the challenge’s baseline placement in 8 of 8 configurations, by a median 1.52x.
• Ran a 198-configuration sensitivity sweep across propagation models, asset classes, and service criteria.

Recommender System for an eCommerce based Rental Clothing Store

November 2024 – December 2024

• Built a custom latent factor model achieving an MSE of 0.317, outperforming baseline, TF-IDF, and SVD models.
• Treated all sizes of an item as one product, reducing data sparsity and improving prediction accuracy.
• Designed and evaluated linguistic-feature and physical-characteristic models of user satisfaction in clothing rentals.
• Delivered a recommender system that generates personalized item recommendations and predicted ratings for each user.

Design and Development of Branch Predictors

May 2024 – June 2024

• Implemented a tournament branch predictor combining global and local prediction, reaching a 1.48% misprediction rate.
• Designed a custom predictor combining gshare and local prediction, reaching a 1.64% misprediction rate.
• Optimized hardware budget allocation across predictors, balancing accuracy and storage within 72–128 Kbit.
• Benchmarked on GCC, ASTAR, H264ref, and NAMD traces, consistently beating a baseline gshare predictor.
• Applied pattern history tables, branch history tables, and meta-predictors to improve CPU performance.

Parallelization of Genetic Pairwise Alignment for ClustalW

January 2024 – March 2024

• Applied wavefront parallelism to ClustalW’s pairwise alignment step, achieving a 1000x speedup over the serial implementation.
• Developed a CUDA algorithm that parallelizes sequence alignments across GPU kernel blocks.
• Integrated the X-Drop heuristic to terminate suboptimal alignments early, further improving efficiency.
• Stored anti-diagonals in shared memory and used parallel reduction to maximize GPU throughput.
• Reached a 770x GPU speedup over a multi-threaded CPU implementation by tuning grid and block sizes.

Dual-Band MIMO Circular Patch Antenna Design and Isolation Analysis

January 2019 – May 2019

• Designed a dual-band (3.5 GHz and 4.5 GHz) circular microstrip patch antenna on an FR4 epoxy substrate.
• Achieved S11 of -38.46 dB at 3.5 GHz and -40.72 dB at 4.5 GHz.
• Implemented and compared four defected ground structure (DGS) isolation techniques for a MIMO configuration.
• Attained up to 28 dB isolation between antenna elements using dual-strip DGS.
• Analyzed S-parameters and radiation patterns in Ansys HFSS.

Technical Skills

• Languages: Python, C/C++, CUDA, Go, Java, Scala, Kotlin, SQL, Bash, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, YAML
• ML & GPU: PyTorch, TensorFlow, CUDA, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, AR/VR
• Backend & Web: Django, Flask, FastAPI, Spring Boot, Hibernate, GraphQL, REST APIs, Express, React, Angular, Flutter, MongoDB
• Infrastructure & DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Git, CI/CD, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Grafana, Splunk, Linux
• Cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, VMware vSphere, Cisco HyperFlex, Cisco Intersight
• Hardware & RF: Raspberry Pi, Arduino, I2C, UART, RS-485, RFID, Ansys HFSS

Certifications

• Deep Learning Specialization (Coursera)
• TensorFlow in Practice Specialization (Coursera)
• AWS Fundamentals Specialization (Coursera)
• Google Cloud Fundamentals (Coursera)
• Machine Learning A-Z: AI, Python & R (Udemy)

Leadership & Activities

Teaching Assistant | Department of Economics and Finance, BITS Hyderabad
January 2019 – May 2019

• Taught Securities and Portfolio Management to a class of 150 students and managed their coursework.
• Improved the class average score by 17 points.

Financial Literacy Programs | Finance Club Member, BITS Hyderabad
August 2016 – May 2018

• Conducted financial literacy programs for students at BITS Hyderabad.

Event Organizer | BITS Hyderabad
August 2016 – May 2019

• Organized and hosted 50+ guest lectures for students and faculty.
• Impacted 10,000+ students across India.