Ambuj Varshney, who gained his PhDin Computer Science in May 2018 from Uppsala University in Sweden, has been granted the second ABB Research Award for his research into an ultra-low power and long-range communication system (LoRea)
for battery-free sensors that harvest small amounts of energy from the ambient environment; the 33-year-old researcher will receive a grant of $300,000 over three years.

His research has the potential to pave the way for a wide-area deployment of battery-free sustainable Networked Embedded Systems (NESs).

NES applications are rapidly increasing. As the number of connected devices is expected to grow to 50 billion in 2020, one of the critical research challenges will be to sustain large-scale deployment.

The jury said that Dr Varshney’s research could support NES in a sustainable manner for a long period, without “negatively impacting the physical or radio environment”.

Peter Voser, chairman and CEO of ABB (www.new.abb.com), said: “Dr Varshney is a worthy recipient of this award, because his innovative approach could dramatically increase our capacity to collect, transmit and ultimately analyse data in an environmentally sustainable manner and so help to pave the way to autonomous industries.”

The ABB Research Award, which is presented every three years, “honours the best PhD dissertation leading to an excellent research proposal in the fields of electrical, mechanical or software engineering, electronics, robotics, artificial intelligence, process automation, and any related technical discipline, as applied in utilities, industries, and transport and infrastructure”.

The next ABB Research Award will be granted in 2022.