Abstract: Wearables have transformed health tracking, but they often fail for the people who most need clinical monitoring: older adults and chronically ill patients. What if AI could instead analyze wireless signals bouncing around a home to measure physiology, detect new disease, flag exacerbations, and track medication response, without wearables, as people live their daily lives? In this talk, I will describe our path to that vision through two advances. First, my lab has built a radio device that interprets wireless reflections from the body to measure respiratory and cardiovascular function, motor and musculoskeletal signals, and brain activity without body contact. Our devices are already used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies and deployed in real-world studies across Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, Crohn’s disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, etc. Second, I will show how we adapt large language models to physiological time series, creating a foundation for screening complex diseases and quantifying medication response. I conclude with a vision for “Invisibles”: AI-powered, contactless sensors that turn everyday spaces into smart health environments and shift care from reactive to proactive.

Bio:Dr. Dina Katabi holds the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professorship in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and serves as the Director of the Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. She is also the President and Co-Founder of Emerald Innovations, Inc., where she spearheads advancements in digital health through cutting-edge wireless biosensing and applied machine learning. A recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, Dr. Katabi is a member of all three national academies: the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.

After earning her B.S. from Damascus University, Dr. Katabi completed both her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees at MIT. Her significant contributions to the field have been honored with numerous awards including the ACM SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award, the ACM Prize in Computing, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, and two ACM SIGCOMM and one ACM SIGMOBILE Test of Time Awards. She has also received the Sloan Research Fellowship, the NBX Career Development Chair, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Dr. Katabi’s leadership is further highlighted by her receipt of three honorary degrees from the Catholic University of America, the American University of Beirut, and the American University of Cairo. Her mentorship has been instrumental in guiding students to win the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in computer science twice. Her work has also garnered the IEEE William R. Bennett Best Paper Prize, three ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper awards, an NSDI Best Paper award, and a TR10 award, recognizing her contributions to technology and computer science.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dina Katabi has been awarded the SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award. She will receive this honor at MobiSys during her keynote address. Learn more about the award.

Abstract: How computing is physically arranged across space is influenced by economic and increasingly also by political factors. Economies of scale and scope have centralized computing from end-user devices and colocation centres into a small number of hyperscale cloud centres owned by U.S. and Chinese technology giants. Other governments concerned that such control points could be weaponized against them are pushing back with data residency requirements and support for local firms. Meanwhile increasing electricity consumption is pulling compute away from users and towards energy sources and cooler climates. In this keynote I will describe the changing geography of computation on a global scale and speculate about possible futures and their implications to mobile systems.

Bio: Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Technology Policy at Aalto University and a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, where he leads the Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL). A leading scholar of the international political economy of digital technologies, he has received three European Research Council grants and advised the European Commission, World Bank, OECD, and multiple governments and companies. His books Cloud Empires and Virtual Economies, published by MIT Press, have been translated into several languages and widely adopted in university teaching.

Lehdonvirta’s current research maps the geopolitics and geoeconomics of cloud and AI infrastructure, examining ownership, dependencies, and strategic policy levers. His work combines social science theory with novel computational methods to analyse digital infrastructures at global scale.

He previously led the influential iLabour project, producing the Online Labour Index—now maintained by the International Labour Organization—and co-authored the two most cited gig-economy studies to date. He has served on multiple European Commission expert groups, sits on editorial boards in digital economy research, and has held academic positions at Oxford, LSE, the University of Tokyo, and the Alan Turing Institute. Trained in economic sociology and information networks, he began his career as a software developer.