Northeastern University campus

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. I direct the Spatial Intelligence Research Group (SINRG).

Email: m.dasari@northeastern.edu   •   Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

My research advances the science and engineering of Spatial Intelligence, which spans several interconnected areas of computing , AI and human-centered technologies:

  • Multimedia Data Foundations

    Representation, compression, and streaming of dynamic 4D/spatial media including point clouds, meshes, Gaussian splats, volumetric 6-DoF videos, and world models.

  • HCI, Visualization, and Graphics

    Interfaces and visual systems that enable humans to interact with spatial data through AR/VR platforms, collaborative environments, and interactive visual representations of complex environments.

  • Education, Learning, and Workforce Training

    Using spatial AI and AR/VR technologies to transform education, training, and skill development through experiential learning systems and collaborative digital environments.

  • Computer Networks and Intelligent Wearable Systems

    Networked systems and wireless communications for smart glasses and spatial AI applications, and distributed infrastructure that supports spatial computing at scale.

My work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), National Security Agency (NSA), and Department of Defense (DoD). I received the NSF CAREER Award (2026) and several best paper and demo awards: including the Best Reproducible Paper Award at ACM Multimedia Systems (MMSys) conference (2025), the Best Demo Award at ACM HotMobile conference (2025), the Innovation Award from the AI-RAN Alliance (2025), the Best Demo Award at DARPA SRC Symposium (2023), and the Best Paper Award at IEEE Multimedia conference (2021).

🚧 For ongoing projects, students, and recent updates, please visit SINRG.org.

Teaching

EECE 5512: Introduction to Spatial Intelligence
Spring 2027, Fall 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024: Northeastern University

An interdisciplinary course covering emerging immersive media, HCI, computer vision, graphics, and computer networks. In addition to lectures, the course includes experiential sessions with a variety of state-of-the-art spatial computers like AR/VR headsets and smart glasses.

  • Fundamentals: computational and human spatial intelligence
  • Fundamentals: visual media, spatial computers, legacy computers
  • Information, digital world representations, and Internet
  • 2D, flat/stereo 360, 3D and volumetric videos: RGB-D, point cloud, mesh, NeRF
  • Monocular, stereoscopic, and multiview videos, and world models
  • Acquiring immersive content for network delivery
  • Compression for RGB, depth, point clouds, and mesh sequences
  • Streaming fundamentals: stored, live, and interactive protocols
  • Streaming immersive content: videos, point clouds, meshes, holograms, spaces
  • Visual and wireless sensing for human motion tracking
  • Building immersive systems such as 3D telepresence and spatial web applications
  • Tracking eyes, hands, face, head, body; outside-in and inside-out systems
  • ARKit, Unity, Open3D, Open4D, Pytorch3D, and networked AR/VR platforms
EECE 2540: Fundamentals of Computer Networks
Spring 2026, Fall 2024: Northeastern University

Selective and Recent Publications


CapGaze: Capactive Sensing-based Eye Tracking on XR and AI Smart Glasses
ACM SenSys 2027: Conference on Embedded AI and Sensing Systems
A First Look at Multimodal Mobile Application Performance on XR and AI Smart Glasses
ACM MobiCom 2026: Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
TSMC: Time-varying 4D Scene Mesh Compression
ACM SIGGRAPH 2026: Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
Paper Code Video
Implicit Surface Compression -- with Good Old Discrete Cosine Transform and Motion Compensation
ACM SIGGRAPH 2026: Conference on Computer Graphics
Paper Video
TVMC: Time-Varying Mesh Compression Using Volume-Tracked Reference Meshes
ACM MMSys 2025: Conference on Multimedia Systems
Paper Code
🏆 Best Reproducible Paper Award
StageAR: Markerless Mobile Phone Localization for AR in Live Events
IEEE VR 2024: Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces
Paper Teaser
MeshReduce: Scalable and Bandwidth Efficient Scene Capture for 3D Telepresence
IEEE VR 2024: Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces
Paper Teaser
Scaling VR Video Conferencing
IEEE VR 2023: Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces
Paper Slides Code Teaser
RoVaR: Robust Multi-agent Tracking through Dual-layer Diversity in Visual and RF Sensing
ACM IMWUT/UbiComp 2023: Conference on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Paper AR Game
Hyper-local Conversational Agents for Serving Spatio-temporal Events of a Neighbourhood
ACM IMWUT/UbiComp 2022: Conference on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Paper
Swift: Adaptive Video Streaming with Layered Neural Codecs
USENIX NSDI 2022: Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
Paper Slides Code Video
Cyclops: An FSO-based Wireless Link for VR Headsets
ACM SIGCOMM 2022: Conference on Data Communications
Paper
PARSEC: Streaming 360-Degree Videos Using Super-Resolution
IEEE INFOCOM 2020: Conference on Computer Communications
Paper Slides Code Video

A full list of papers can be found here.