The Great Indoors: The Next Frontier in Location-Based Services

Indoor positioning is the next frontier in location technology for mobile devices. The popularity of smartphones and location based applications is driving GPS attach rates on handsets to unprecedented levels. However a whole new world indoors, remains unexplored. New technology is needed for enabling positioning indoors and several new applications can benefit from the presence of such capability such as navigation and search, aisle level location of retail items, check-ins, gaming etc.

Indoor positioning is an extremely challenging problem since traditional positioning systems such as GPS either fail completely indoors or fail to provide the desired level of accuracy. This talk will discuss multiple sources of information including radio measurements, sensor data and building maps that can be used for indoor positioning and describe how probabilistic inference techniques can be used to combine these to obtain precise indoor location on a smartphone. This talk will also provide an overview of the indoor location, discusses several use cases, challenges and approaches to dealing with them.
Rajarshi Gupta is a Senior Staff Engineer and Manager at Qualcomm Research, which he joined in July 2005. He began working on heterogenous networks and femto cells as part of the 4G LTE project, where he was the SON (self organizing networks) lead and also a delegate to 3GPP RAN3. In August 2008, Rajarshi moved to Qualcomm Research Silicon Valley (QRSV) to be an engineering lead on the Indoor Positioning project, which was commercialized in 2012 as part of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8960 chipset. He is currently leading a new project on behavior-based detection of malware on mobile phones.

Rajarshi loves to work on challenging unsolved problems, and has demonstrated his innovative abilities by authoring over 120 filed patents. Rajarshi also heads the University Relations program for QRSV, and created the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QInF). Prior to joining Qualcomm Research, Rajarshi completed his M.S. and PhD in EECS at UC Berkeley, having worked for a start-up in between the two degrees.