Sarah Tanveer

Hey! I’m Sarah. I am currently pursuing my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I am advised by Prof. Suman Banerjee, and Prof. Ali Abedi. I am currently working in wireless networking and sensing. I completed my Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the Lahore University of Management Sciences where I was advised by Prof. Zafar Ayyub Qazi, Prof. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi and Prof. Zartash Afzal Uzmi. My work with them revolved around Internet measurements, Web Equity, and webpage debloating.

Other than that, one of my passions is to uplift women in STEM and I am an avid crocheter and knitter!

Publications

• [To appear in DySpan '26] Frictionless Reproducibility in Spectrum Research: A Platform for Open Data, Shared Code, and Competitive Benchmarking
  Sarah Tanveer, Gianna McLeod, Anant Sahai, Ali Abedi

• [NRSM '26] Propagation Measurements in the 7GHz Band near the VLA Telescope
  Sarah Tanveer, Ali Abedi
  Paper

• [CoNEXT '25] Vivisecting Starlink Throughput: Measurement and Prediction
  Zikun Liu, Fan (Gabriella) Xue, Sarah Tanveer, Deepak Vasisht
  Paper

• [SIGCOMM '23] A Framework for Improving Web Affordability and Inclusiveness
  Rumaisa Habib*, Sarah Tanveer*, Aimen Iman, Haseeb Ahmed, Zafar Ayyub Qazi, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Zartash Afzal Uzmi, Ayesha Ali [*Co-first authors]
  Paper · Video · Code

Research Projects

• Frictionless Reproducibility in Spectrum Research
  University of Wisconsin - Madison | SpectrumX | Research Assistant
  • Built an end-to-end platform to introduce frictionless reproducibility principles to spectrum-aware machine learning.
  • The platform integrates curated datasets, a standardized submission interface, automated and isolated execution, and public leaderboards for fair and transparent comparison of spectrum-related methods and systems.
  • The platform is currently being used for SpectrumX Student Data Competitions.

• Propagation Measurements in the 7GHz Band near the VLA Telescope
  University of Wisconsin - Madison | Research Assistant
  • Analyzed novel signal measurements near the VLA telescope of an emulated signal operating in the 7 GHz band using GNURadio and signal processing pipelines.
  • Results showed signals transmitted at a smartphone-level power from distances up to 15 km, with Signal-to-Noise Ratio values exceeding 30dB.

• Identifying Radio Interference
  University of Wisconsin - Madison | Research Assistant
  • Designed and implemented TraceSat, a system to attribute passively received satellite signals to LEO satellites using Doppler compensation without requiring knowledge of signal properties.
  • Built an RF signal processing pipeline that enumerates candidate satellites from orbital ephemeris data, calculates their Doppler profiles, compensates predicted Doppler trajectories in IQ recordings, and outputs a predicted satellite using spectral concentration metrics.
  • Built a system to collect satellite signals using LNBs, BladeRFs and GNURadio.
  • Improved runtime of pipeline using CuDA and multiprocessing libraries.
  • Collected and curated labeled datasets of 174 minutes of satellite signals using radio telescopes and low-cost SDR monitoring platforms.
  • Evaluated the system on real-world Starlink, NOAA, and CubeSat signals, achieving up to 98% satellite attribution accuracy under realistic observation conditions.
  • Poster presented at Small Satellite Conference 2025: [Link]
  • Deployed a visualization tool for simulating the orbits of field of view satellites on HuggingFace. Presented in Internet Visualization Exhibition, SIGCOMM 2025. [Link]

• Starlink Throughput Measurement and Prediction
  University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | Research Intern
  • Automated data collection using iPerf and Bash to analyze and visualize the throughput pattern of Starlink using matplotlib and seaborn.
  • Utilized the Starlink user terminal APIs to infer orbits and connection patterns for satellites using obstruction maps.
  • To appear in CoNEXT 2025

• Caching Schemes for Short-Form Video Content
  University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | Research Intern
  • Developed a system to evaluate caching schemes for short-form video content using Python sockets and CloudLab.

• A Framework for Improving Web Affordability and Inclusiveness
  Lahore University of Management Sciences | Research Assistant
  • Conducted a large-scale measurement study of around 72,000 webpages to analyze the affordability of the Web.
  • Proposed and implemented AW4A, debloating framework to decrease average webpage sizes with minimal quality degradation in Python using Selenium, OpenCV, PIL, WebDriver, multiprocessing, and Pandas.
  • Using AW4A, 50% of webpages maintained a quality of greater than 0.98 with up to 50% page size reductions.
  • Authored the successful proposal for the Students as Co-Researchers grant.
  • Resulted in a first-author publication in SIGCOMM 2023

• An Analysis of Local Browsing Caching
  Lahore University of Management Sciences | Research Assistant
  • Led a team of four students on a project on local web browser caching and its affects on web affordability.
  • Designed measurement experiments to analyze the impact of local caching on web page sizes using appium.
  • Analyzed factors that impact local caching on low-end devices.

Work & Teaching

• Teaching Assistant | University of Wisconsin - Madison
  • CS 640 Introduction to Computer Networks (Spring 2025):
  • Class of 80+ students.
  • Improved online tool to generate practice questions relating to topics such as TCP, routing etc, using FastAPI, uvicorn and Firebase.
  • CS 407 Foundations of Mobile Systems and Applications (Fall 2024):
  • Class of 325+ students.
  • Developed 10+ Lab Assignments focusing on Android Development in Java and Kotlin.

• Lahore University of Management Sciences
  Summer School Instructor | Summer 2024
  • Designed a course on navigating LLMs and GenAI tools as an elementary and middle school student covering topics such as responsible use, plagiarism, and critical thinking for a class of 50+ students.
  • Delivered lectures, and designed assignments for the summer school course.

• Teaching Assistant
  • CS 678 Topics in Internet Research (Spring 2023): Mentored 20+ students with research projects, Graduate level course.
  • CS 362 Network-Centric Computing (Spring 2022): Managed 150+ students and created evaluation material. Held regular office hours.
  • CS 225 Fundamentals of Computer Systems (Fall 2021): Managed 50+ students and created evaluation material. Held regular office hours and tutorials.

• Tajir (YC W20) | June 2022 – July 2022
  Software Engineering Intern
  • Implemented internal business analytics tools with Retool, JavaScript, Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, and SQL.
  • Conducted market/user research and designed a new customer service UI using Figma, deployed to the app.

Leadership

• LUMS Women in Computing
  General Secretary | Executive Council September 2022 – May 2023
  • Led Events and Outreach Departments for the student organization.
  • Coordinated events such as panel talks, information sessions, team-building sessions etc. to empower and uplift women in STEM and Computer Science.
  • Secured 60,000 PKR in sponsorship from local tech companies.
  • Successfully conducted a bootcamp to teach high school girls Python Programming with 50+ participants from over 5 high schools, serving as senior instructor.
  Director | Events Department August 2021 - September 2022
  • Led the events department for the student organization.
  • Organized 5+ events such as panel talks, information sessions, bootcamps etc. to empower and uplift women in STEM and Computer Science.
  • Served as Junior Instructor for a bootcamp to teach high school girls Python Programming with 30+ participants from over 5 high schools.
  • Developed course plan, assignments, and programming labs for the bootcamp.

Technical Skills

• Programming Languages: Python, C/C++, JavaScript, Go, SQL, Java, Kotlin
• Systems & Infrastructure: Linux, Git, Docker, CloudLab, Conda
• Networking & RF Tools: WebPageTest, iPerf, mitmproxy, GNURadio, BladeRFs/USRPs
• Other Tools and Technologies: Firebase, Express, React, NodeJS, Figma, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Selenium, Appium, MySQL, Postman, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, OpenCV, HuggingFace, Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, Android Studio

Contact Me

Email: sarah.tanveer@wisc.edu