What do we do? Verma Lab’s research focus is on integrated circuits and systems for intelligent sensing.

But let’s be more specific. While, intelligence, on a conceptual level, has been a driver of electronic systems for quite some time, the last few years have brought a clear transformation in what this means. Today, electronic systems have begun to surpass humans in specific tasks traditionally associated with cognition. With this, electronics is poised to redefine its relationship with people and society. The potential, more than ever, is driving electronics from the confinements of cyber systems, to systems that pervade all aspects of our lives, where its impacts can be far greater in value, scale, and breadth. While, sensing (and actuation) has traditionally referred simply to signal transduction, in this new context it refers to the mechanisms by which such pervasion can occur. With this framing, intelligent sensing brings fundamental challenges to the forefront. The early examples we have of robotic and cyber-physical systems based on artificial intelligence, show that in the intricate, dynamic, resource-constrained, and noisy scenarios encountered in the real world, current approaches either fail completely or fall far short of the potential. The perspective taken by Verma Lab is that the solutions must span algorithms from machine learning (which make decisions about what is happening in the world and how systems should best respond) and emerging sensing technologies (which interface such decision making with the real world through the ways embedded signals are acquired). In realizing these solutions, our research explores new alignments across algorithms, architectures, circuits, and technological fabrics, in terms of insights, design principles, and experimental demonstrations.