Ali Abedi | UW-Madison

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining UW-Madison, I was a postdoc at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, advised by Professors Anant Sahai and Sachin Katti. I received my PhD from the University of Waterloo, advised by Professor Tim Brecht. My research area is computer systems and networking with a special focus on wireless networking/sensing, and low-power and low-cost networking for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
My Curriculum Vitae (Updated October 2024).

Services:

Technical Program Committee (TPC) member for ACM MobiCom 2025 and 2026, DySPAN 2026, and ACM HotMobile 2024
Chair of Posters and Demos DySPAN 2026
Guest editor of the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Sensors
Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC), IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ)

Email: abedi{at}cs.wisc.edu

Address: Morgridge Hall room 7671

News

December 17, 2025 Vartika Shekhar is recognized as honorable mention for the 2025-2026 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

October 27, 2025 Sarah Tanveer selected as a finalist in the Student Paper Competition in NRSM 2026.

Research Projects

"Polite" wireless protocols: privacy/security consequences

I found a loophole in the Wi-Fi standard that allows forcing a Wi-Fi device to continuously transmit packets. The discovery of this loophole has led to several interesting studies that look at the privacy and security consequences: HotNets 2020, MobiCom 2022, IEEE IoT Journal 2023, IEEE Sensors Journal 2023

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Automatic evaluation of RF sensors without supervision

RF sensors are a key building block of a variety of wireless systems from spectrum monitoring to environmental sensing. We design systems that automatically evaluate these sensors using "signals of opportunity" without any human supervision: HotNets 2023

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Low-power and battery-free networking for IoT

Billions of new IoT devices will be shipped in the near future. To make them zero maintenance and to lower their environmental pollution impact, it is desirable to eliminate the battery or make their batteries last for tens of years. We have designed low-power and battery-free networking solutions for the 2.4 GHz WiFi and 24 GHz mmWave bands: SIGCOMM 2019, HotNets 2019, SIGCOMM 2020, MobiCom 2021

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Publications

A complete list of my publications can be found on Google Scholar.

Here is a list of selected publications

HotNets 2024: A Abedi, J Sanz, M Zheleva, and A Sahai, From Foe to Friend: The Surprising Turn of Mega Constellations in Radio Astronomy
DySPAN 2024: J. Sanz, A. Abedi and A. Sahai, Automatic indoor-outdoor detection using signals of opportunity
HotNets 2023: A. Abedi, J. Sanz, and A. Sahai, Automatic Calibration in Crowd-sourced Network of Spectrum Sensors
FNWF 2023: S. Arslan, A. Abedi, S. Katti, d-Cellular: Trust-Free Connectivity in Decentralized Cellular Networks
Best paper award
MobiCom 2022: A. Abedi, D. Vasisht, Non-Cooperative WiFi Localization and its Privacy Implications
MobiCom 2021: F. Dehbashi, A. Abedi, T. Brecht, and O. Abari, Can WiFi Backscatter Replace RFID?
HotNets 2021: A. Abedi and O. Abari, Can WiFi Backscatter Achieve the Range of RFID? Nulling to the Rescue
SIGCOMM 2020: A. Abedi, F. Dehbashi, M. Mazaheri, O. Abari, and T. Brecht, WiTAG: Seamless WiFi Backscatter Communication
HotNets 2020: A. Abedi and O. Abari, WiFi Says “Hi!” Back to Strangers!
SIGCOMM 2019: M. Mazaheri, S. Ameli, A.Abedi, O. Abari, A Millimeter Wave Network for Billions of Things
HotNets 2019: A. Abedi, O. Abari, T. Brecht, Wi-LE: Can WiFi Replace Bluetooth?
HotNets 2018: A. Abedi, M. H. Mazaheri, O. Abari, T. Brecht, WiTAG: Rethinking Backscatter Communication for WiFi Networks
MobiCom 2018: M. H. Mazaheri, A. Abedi, O. Abari, Poster: Bringing mmWave Communications to Raspberry Pi
Awarded the gold medal in the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC)
MASCOTS 2014: A.Abedi, and T. Brecht, T-SIMn: T-RATE: A Framework for the Trace-Driven Evaluation of 802.11 Rate Adaptation Algorithms
Best paper nominee