Milijana Surbatovich Receives NSF CAREER Award to Study Battery-Free Devices

Milijana Surbatovich, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award to advance research on intermittent computing platforms, a class of devices designed to operate without batteries by harvesting energy from their surroundings.

Surbatovich, who also has appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, is the principal investigator on the award, which is expected to total about $680,000 over the next five years.

The NSF CAREER award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in their department's or organization's mission.

“I am honored and grateful to have received this support from the National Science Foundation,” Surbatovich said. “It will enable me to work with graduate students to pursue this research in creating rigorously principled, secure systems for extreme edge devices, and in educating undergraduate students to create provably well-behaved software for critical systems. I am also grateful for the mentorship and feedback from my colleagues in UMD’s Plum lab, particularly Leo Lampropoulos.”

Surbatovich’s work focuses on systems that can continue operating when power is unreliable. Intermittent computing platforms harvest energy from sources such as light, motion or radio waves rather than batteries, allowing them to operate in settings where replacing or recharging batteries may be difficult.

That capability could make the devices useful in disaster zones, health wearables, implants, tiny satellites and other environments where traditional embedded devices may be hard to maintain. The challenge is that harvested energy is unpredictable, causing devices to shut down and restart repeatedly.

Those failures can introduce software errors, creating risks for applications where bugs could cause harm or be exploited. Surbatovich’s project aims to address that issue by developing theory and practical tools for building an embedded operating system that can be verified, or proven by machine, to execute applications correctly and securely despite repeated power failures.

Before joining UMD, Surbatovich earned her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in 2023. Her research applies programming languages and formal methods techniques to the design of correct, reliable and secure system stacks for nontraditional computing platforms, with broader interests at the intersection of programming languages, computer architecture and security.

She received Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab Presidential Fellowship in 2021 and was selected as a University of Texas at Austin 2022 Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

—Story by Samuel Malede Zewdu, CS Communications