Tanvir Ahmed

Hi, I'm currently a PhD student at Cornell Tech in New York City, where I explore novel applications of wireless sensing technologies.

I am fortunate to be advised by Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, with Deborah Estrin and Noah Snavely on my PhD committee.

In summer 2026, I interned with the EDF/MethaneSAT Data Platform team, working under Sasha Ayvazov's supervision to improve estimates of background methane concentrations.

Email / CV / Scholar / X (Twitter) / Github / LinkedIn

May 2025, Annapolis, Maryland.

News

June 2026: 🥳 Our paper mmFHE, on end-to-end encrypted mmWave sensing, was accepted to ACM MobiCom'26! I'm excited to attend the conference in Austin this October.

May 2026: 🌎 I joined the Environmental Defense Fund's MethaneSAT Data Platform as a research fellow through the PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship.

May 2025: 🥳 Excited to be awarded the Digital Life Initiative (DLI) Doctoral Fellowship for 2025-26 at Cornell Tech!!

February 2025: 🧑‍🏫 Our work VitalHide was presented at HotMobile'25 in Palm Springs, CA.

December 2024: 🧑‍🏫 Our work on RF lead sensing in soil was presented at EWSN'24 in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

August 2023: 😭 Started my PhD in Cornell Information Science at the Cornell Tech campus in NYC!

July 2023: 🎓 Obtained my Masters in EEE from (BUET).

Research

I'm interested in wireless sensing, signal processing, healthcare, and AI. Works done during my PhD are highlighted.

	mmFHE: mmWave Sensing with End-to-End Fully Homomorphic Encryption Tanvir Ahmed, Yixuan Gao, Adnan Armouti, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar ACM MobiCom, 2026 arXiv End-to-end fully homomorphic encryption for privacy-preserving mmWave sensing on untrusted cloud infrastructure.
	VitalHide: Enabling Privacy-Aware Wireless Sensing of Vital Signs Yixuan Gao^, Tanvir Ahmed^, Zekun Chang, Thijs Roumen, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar * Equal contribution ACM HotMobile, 2025 paper / NYC Privacy Day at Google presentation / ACM Showcase on Kudos Smart textile based solution to protect against unwanted monitoring of breathing and heart rate.
	Feasibility of Radio Frequency Based Wireless Sensing of Lead Contamination in Soil Yixuan Gao, Tanvir Ahmed, Zhongqi Cheng, Mikhail Mohammed, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar EWSN, 2024 (Best Paper Award) paper / Cornell Chronicle / Phys.org / MSN / American Technion Society / KARMACTIVE RF based system to detect lead contamination in soil.
	Biomimicry in Nanotechnology: a Comprehensive Review Mehedi Hasan Himel, Bejoy Sikder, Tanvir Ahmed, Sajid Muhaimin Choudhury Nanoscale Advances, 2023 paper A review of biomimicry in nanotechnology.
	COVID-19 Identification From Lung CT Scans in a Low-Resource Setting Using a Regularized 3D Convolutional Neural Network Tanvir Ahmed, Mohtasim Nakib, Md Messal Monem Miah, Mohammad Ariful Haque ICECE, 2022 paper / pre-print Identifying COVID-19 from lung CT scans in a low-resource setting using a regularized 3D convolutional neural network.

Miscellanea

Service

Reviewer: ACM DIS 2025, ACM CHI Case Studies 2025

Topic Chair: IEEE ECCE 2025

Student Volunteer: ACM HotMobile 2025

Awards

2026: PiTech PhD Impact Fellow ($20,000 fellowship support), Cornell Tech

2025: Digital Life Initiative (DLI) Doctoral Fellow ($5000 research funding), Cornell Tech

2025: Student Travel Grant Recipient, HotMobile'25, Palm Springs, CA

2024: EWSN'24 Best Paper Award for the paper "Feasibility of Radio Frequency Based Wireless Sensing of Lead Contamination in Soil"

2024: Student Travel Grant Recipient, EWSN'24, Abu Dhabi, UAE (unable to attend due to visa issues)

2023: Photo Contest Winner, "Tech Innovation in Frame" category, Cornell Tech

2019: Undergraduate Degree Awarded with Honors (Cumulative GPA ≥ 3.75), BUET

2015, 2016, 2018: Dean's List Award (Academic Year GPA ≥ 3.75), BUET

2015, 2016, 2017, 2018: University Merit Award, BUET

2017: National Idea Competition, Top 10, Ministry of Power, Energy & Mineral Resources, Bangladesh

2014: National Physics Olympiad, 1^st position, St. Joseph Higher Secondary School, Dhaka, Bangladesh

2014: Bangladesh Physics Olympiad, 7^th position, Dhaka Divisional, Bangladesh

Teaching

Graduate Teaching Assistant @ Cornell Tech:
ECE 5260/ORIE 5735 Graph-Based Data Science for Networked Systems (Spring 2025)
CS/INFO 5304 Data Science in the Wild (Spring 2024)
INFO 5600 AI for Healthcare (Fall 2023, 2024, 2026)

Lecturer @ Brac University:
January 2020 - August 2023
Courses: CSE 460 VLSI Design, CSE 428 Image Processing, CSE 350 Digital Electronics and Pulse Techniques, CSE 251 Electronic Devices and Circuits, CSE 250 Circuits and Electronics

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