Alexander (Alex) Varshavsky Ph.D. Candidate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Expected graduation: August 2008 Advisor: Eyal de Lara 40 St. George Street Toronto, Ontario M5S 2E4 Phone: (416) 946-0241 Fax: (416) 978-4765 Email: walex@cs.toronto.edu

[New!] I have accepted a research position at AT&T Research Lab starting in Fall 2008!

I am a fifth year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. My research interests lie in mobile and ubiquitous computing.

I am interested in developing software infrastructure solutions for mobile and ubiquitous computing applications. My current research focuses on proximity-based authentication, location-aware systems and activity recognition.

I developed the first indoor localization system based on GSM fingerprinting that achieves a median accuracy of 4 meters and worked on enabling spontaneous and secure communication between mobile devices based on the knowledge of the common radio environment.

My previous work dealt with improving performance in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Specifically, I focused on alleviating self-interference between communicating nodes, dealing with the hidden terminal problem, and designing a cross-layer service discovery protocol for MANETs.

Selected Papers [Complete list of publications]

• Calibree: Calibration-free Localization using Relative Distance Estimations
  Alex Varshavsky, Denis Pankratov, John Krumm and Eyal de Lara
  to appear at the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2008), Sydney, Australia, 2008 (acceptance rate: 15%)
  

• GSM Indoor Localization
  Alex Varshavsky, Eyal de Lara, Anthony LaMarca, Jeffrey Hightower, and Veljo Otsason
  Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal (PMC), vol. 3, no. 6, pp 698-720, Elsevier, 2007
  

• Amigo: Proximity-based Authentication of Mobile Devices
  Alex Varshavsky, Adin Scannell, Anthony LaMarca and Eyal de Lara
  Ninth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2007), Innsbruk, Austria, 2007 (acceptance rate: 19%)
  

Program Committee

• International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA 2009)

• Workshop on Security and Privacy Issues in Mobile Phone Use (SPMU 2008)
• International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA 2007)

Publicity Chair

• International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2009)
• International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA 2009)

• International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys 2008)
• International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2008)
• Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile 2008)
• International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2007)