We build sustainable, long-lived embedded systems — often decentralized, batteryless, low-power, intermittent, unobtrusive, and community-grounded — so computing and intelligence can better serve people and place.

As data centers consume water and drive up global power demand, and as computing lurches toward a trillion connected devices, we design and build alternative computing systems from the ground up: battery-free, decentralized, distributed, energy-harvesting, and energy-efficient devices intended to mitigate the ecological impacts of climate change, respect community and culture, enable new health-focused applications, and increase accessibility of computing and intelligence.

• Intermittent & battery-free computing — runtime systems, hardware platforms, and tools for devices that run on harvested energy and treat power loss as normal, not exceptional.
• Sustainable & carbon-aware computing — quantifying and reducing the ecological footprint of edge devices and infrastructure.
• Indigenous-led cyberinfrastructure — community-maintained sensing and AI systems developed with and for Native Hawaiian, Ojibwe, and other Indigenous communities.
• Culturally-grounded AI for education — tools like Kumu Connect that support Hawaiian immersion educators with place-based, language-aware curricula.
• Wearable & mobile health systems — accessible, privacy-respecting sensing for underserved communities.
• Game-based and narrative learning — projects like Kaona, exploring restorative futurism through tabletop RPG design.

Josiah Hester is an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing and Computer Science at Georgia Tech, directing the Center for Advancing Responsible Computing and serving on the leadership team of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. He was honored with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2025, named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science in 2022, and named one of Popular Science's Brilliant 10 in 2021.

We work closely with the Center for Advancing Responsible Computing and the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems at Georgia Tech, and partner directly with Tribal, Native, non-profit, and multi-institutional collectives for social-impact work, including the STRONG Manoomin Collective, Purple Maiʻa Foundation, and Ulu Lāhui Foundation.

Generously supported by the National Science Foundation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, the Army Research Office, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, VMware, Google, Dolby, and 3M.