Doctoral Thesis Proposal - Sagar Bharadwaj Kalasibail Seetharam
April 24, 2026 2:30PM—4:00PM
Location:
4405 & Zoom
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Gates and Hillman Centers
Speaker:
SAGAR BHARADWAJ KALASIBAIL SEETHARAM,
Ph.D. Student, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University
https://sagar-bharadwaj-ks.github.io/
Spatial applications, i.e., applications that tie digital information with the physical world, have improved many of our daily activities, such as navigation and ride-sharing. This class of applications also holds significant promise of enabling new industries such as augmented reality and robotics. The development of these applications is enabled by spatial intelligence systems, or systems that can provide physically-grounded services such as routing, spatial search, and localization. Today, mapping platforms provided by organizations like Google and Apple serve as spatial intelligence systems. These maps are centralized and primarily cover outdoor spaces. We envision that future spatial applications, such as persistent world-scale augmented reality and robotics, would require detailed and precise spatial intelligence across indoor and outdoor spaces. The scale of cartography efforts required to survey indoor spaces and their privacy needs inhibit existing centralized maps from incorporating such spaces into their platform.
This thesis proposes the design and implementation of OpenFLAME, a federated spatial intelligence platform built on two core pillars. First, it introduces a federated mapping infrastructure where independent parties can manage and serve their own maps of physical regions. This unlocks scalability of map management, isolation, and privacy of maps. This is implemented on top of the existing Domain Name System (DNS), which enables us to leverage its existing infrastructure. Second, it explores the development of spatial services, such as search, routing, and localization, by transforming raw spatial data (e.g., images and videos) of a space into structured, queryable maps that support these capabilities.
Thesis Committee:
Srinivasan Seshan (Co-Chair)
Anthony Rowe (Co-Chair)
Justine Sherry
Hari Balakrishnan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
In-person & Zoom
For More Information:
Matt Stewart