Noah Klugman

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)

What challenges arise when deploying a novel technology at increasing scale? This case study details our experience developing and deploying technologies to monitor power outages and voltage fluctuations at high temporal and geographic frequency. After a small initial pilot, our deployment grew over time and eventually exceeded 450 sensors and 3500...

Complicated systems are complicated to monitor. The electric grid is one of the most complicated systems, and subsequently goes under-monitored in many regions around the world that cannot easily afford expensive meters. However, the electric grid is also critical for sustaining a high quality of life, and requires better monitoring than is often a...

“Modern energy for all,” an internationally supported initiative to connect populations to electricity services, is expected to help reduce poverty-induced vulnerabilities. It has become a primary strategy for meeting sustainable development goals, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. However, when electricity is supplied by a capacity-constrained gri...

The smartphone is an incredible computing platform. Loaded with powerful processing, vast data storage, near-global connectivity, built-in batteries, and a rich array of sensors, these devices reliably service the needs of billions of users every day. However, when tasked to run just a single application continuously without any human interaction,...

The vision of sensor systems that collect critical and previously ungathered information about the world is often only realized when sensors, students, and subjects move outside the academic laboratory. However, deployments at even the smallest scales introduce complexities and risks that can be difficult for a research team to anticipate. Over the...

Incentives are a key facet of human studies research, yet the state-of-the-art often designs and implements incentive systems in an ad-hoc, on-demand manner. We introduce the first vocabulary for formally describing incentive systems and develop a software infrastructure that enables UI-based graphical generation of complex, auditable, reliable, an...

Network connectivity is often one of the most challenging aspects of deploying sensors. In many countries, cellular networks provide the most reliable, highest bandwidth, and greatest coverage option for internet access. Repurposing smartphones as gateways could extract value from hundreds of millions of devices currently considered to be e-waste....

Network connectivity is often one of the most challenging aspects of deploying sensors. In many countries, cellular networks provide the most reliable, highest bandwidth, and greatest coverage option for Internet access. While this makes smartphones a seemingly ideal platform to serve as a gateway between sensors and the cloud, we find that a devic...

Building connected, pervasive, human-facing, and responsive applications that incorporate local sensors, smartphone interactions, device actuation, and cloud-based learning--the promised features of the Internet of Things (IoT)---requires a complete suite of tools spanning both hardware and software. We present a set of these pieces, including a ga...

The Fifth ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV-5) focused on applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computing in developing regions. It highlighted research results from contexts where conventional computing solutions are often inappropriate due to limited resources and a variety of contextual factors. Focusing on i...

The vision of an Internet of Things (IoT) has captured the imagination of the world and raised billions of dollars, all before we stopped to deeply consider how all these Things should connect to the Internet. The current state-of-the-art requires application-layer gateways both in software and hardware that provide applicationspecific connectivity...

The power grid is one of humanity's most significant engineer-ing undertakings and it is essential in developed and developing nations alike. Currently, transparency into the power grid relies on utility companies and more fine-grained insight is provided by costly smart meter deployments. We claim that greater visibility into power grid conditions...

Mobile phones hold considerable promise for delivering evidence-based smoking cessation interventions that require frequent and objective assessment of smoking status via breath carbon monoxide (Breath CO) measurement. However, there are currently no commercially available mobile-phone-based Breath CO meters. We developed a mobile-phone-based Breat...