The Infosys Prize 2026 in Engineering and Computer Science is awarded to Prof. Swarun Kumar for pioneering work that extends low-power wireless networks beyond information delivery to perception and action in the physical world. He combines insights on the physics of wireless with novel architectures and algorithms to obtain innovative designs in connectivity, sensing, control and actuation.
Scope and Impact of Work
Prof. Swarun Kumar’s research has transformed wireless systems from information delivery to physical sensing and control. He drives technologies from physical-layer sensing and signal processing to communications and networking architectures, and from available hardware to new experimental systems that demonstrate entirely new capabilities. Prof. Kumar combines tremendous insight into radio propagation and signal-processing algorithms, networking protocols, and architectures to achieve system-level goals such as enabling inexpensive, energy-constrained devices to communicate with, perceive, and interact with their surroundings.
Kumar has made low-power wireless networks more capable and scalable through creative and sophisticated engineering. For example, he exploited small frequency differences from inexpensive oscillators to distinguish overlapping transmissions, turning a hardware imperfection into a way to improve network performance. In another award-winning paper, Prof. Kumar’s team combined signals from geographically distributed base stations to recover transmissions that would otherwise be too weak to decode.
In more recent projects, Swarun Kumar showed how wireless energy can produce controlled physical motion using heat-responsive materials to actuate soft robots without onboard electronics and later demonstrated frequency-selective actuation. The algorithms address the challenge of focusing energy without relying on electronic feedback from the robot. Taken together, these contributions form a coherent progression from connecting constrained devices, to locating and powering them, to controlling their interaction with the physical world, supporting an expansive vision of communications, sensing, and actuation.
Bio
Swarun Kumar leads the Emerging Wireless Technologies Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University as the Sathaye Family Foundation Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department with affiliations in the Computer Science department, Human Computer Interaction Institute, and the CyLab.
Prof. Kumar received the George Sprowls Award for the best Ph. D. thesis in Computer Science at MIT, and the President of India Gold Medal at IIT Madras. Kumar’s recognitions include the ACM SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award (2021) and the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award (2024), the latter specifically recognizing his advances in low-power network range and programmable, targeted wireless energy delivery.
Timeline
Jury Citation
Prof. Swarun Kumar is an extraordinary researcher who has made pioneering contributions in a diverse array of wireless systems for connectivity, sensing and actuation. In wireless networking, he has developed innovative solutions for severe resource constraints in settings ranging from wide-area networks such as long range to battery less RF backscatter tags. His research on wireless sensing is similarly broad, drawing on modalities ranging from millimeter wave radar to acoustic waves, and targeting applications such as contactless sensing for health monitoring, indoor positioning, and inferring material properties.
Beyond sensing, his research has enabled innovations in remote actuation such as powering and actuating electronics-free soft robots via radio frequency beams directed at an energy-harvesting and shape-shifting material. Prof. Kumar’s research is an inspiring example of the potential real-world impact of creative systems conceptualization and designs that harness advances in component technologies.
Swarun Kumar
On behalf of our jury, I extend my warmest felicitations to Prof. Swarun Kumar on winning the Infosys Prize 2026 in Engineering and Computer Science. Prof. Kumar has made important advances in low-power internet-of-things, with contributions to wide area networking, battery-free communications technology, smart infrastructure monitoring, medical applications and many others. Congratulations, Prof. Kumar!
