Alex Cabral

About Me

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ka Moamoa Lab at Georgia Tech. My primary research project is focused on designing and deploying low-cost sensing devices to monitor environmental factors of manoomin, wild rice that grows in the Great Lakes region and is essential to Indigenous North American culture, economy, and sustenance. This work is part of the multi-institute Strong Manoomin Collective, which is funded by multiple NSF grants.

I earned a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University, where I was co-advised by Jim Waldo and Amy Mueller and selected as a 2024 Siebel Scholar and CPS Rising Star. My PhD research was focused on designing reliable, scalable, and equitable sensor networks for urban environmental sensing. From 2020 to 2022, I was a member of the Urban Innovation group at Microsoft Research, where I helped deploy and maintain the Eclipse air quality sensing network.

Research Interests

• Low-Cost Sensor Networks: network design, energy harvesting, network deployment strategies
• Smart Cities: urban informatics, city and community engagement, urban digital twins
• Environmental Informatics:: spatiotemporal data visualization, data sovereignty

Recent News

• [Nov. 2024] Our paper “Makak: Co-designing Environmental Sensors to Protect Manoomin (Wild Rice)” was accepted for CHI 2025!
• [Oct. 2024] I was invited to serve on the Program Committee for CSCW 2025.
• [Oct. 2024] I will be attending EWSN 2024 to participate in the PhD/Postdoc School and present a poster.
• [Jun. 2024] I have officially accepted an offer as a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Ka Moamoa group at Georgia Tech.
• [Apr. 2024] I successfully defended my dissertation at Harvard University!

Publications

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