Meet CBI’s industry mentors: Emily Ruppel

The Carnegie Bosch Institute (CBI) is proud to team with Bosch Research associates who bring a wealth of expertise and real-world insights to the CBI fellows program in the role of CBI industry mentors. These mentors are seasoned research scientists from Bosch, each with years of hands-on experience and leadership in their respective fields. Their role is to provide invaluable industry perspectives that complement the academic and entrepreneurial training of the Fellows, helping to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and practical application. Each mentor specializes in a critical area shaping the future of technology and business: robotics, sustainability, artificial intelligence (AI), and safety and security. Through direct engagement, workshops, and one-on-one guidance, these mentors offer CBI fellows not only technical insights but also strategic advice on how to navigate complex, fast-evolving industries. This partnership ensures that fellows are equipped with the skills, knowledge, as well as the industry alignment needed to drive impactful innovation.

This month, we will highlight Emily Ruppel, research scientist, who focuses on sustainability for CBI.

Where did you get your Ph.D. and what did you study?

I earned my Ph.D. from the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University where I was advised by Brandon Lucia. My thesis simplified the task of programming tiny, resource-constrained, energy-harvesting sensor nodes that operate without batteries. In particular, my work focused on how to handle the sensors, actuators, and radios that energy-harvesting devices need to interact with the physical world. Batteryless sensing and computing is exciting because it allows us to push intelligence into places where batteries cannot go due to size, weight, cost, or maintenance constraints.

Applications range from remote, maintenance-free agriculture sensing to battery-free satellites in low-earth-orbit. Of course these opportunities are paired with the challenge that these devices do not operate continuously—they operate in short bursts as power is available, which is very different from typical computers.

What interested you in that topic and how does it /does it relate to what you do now?

My favorite part about studying batteryless, energy-harvesting devices was the attention to detail required at all levels of the hardware/software stack. Due to their highly constrained nature, these devices have an unusually tight coupling between the hardware, operating system, programming language design, and application software. If one level of this stack is underperforming, the whole system may not even turn on. I really enjoyed the process of building tools to make it easier for a typical programmer to handle these devices without having a deep understanding of every component in the system.

As a Bosch Research Scientist, I use many of the same embedded and systems engineering skills I built up as a Ph.D. student. While the systems I work on today are continuously powered, the challenges of defining reusable abstractions and optimizing across layers of the stack still appear.

My research focuses on optimizing distributed embedded systems that interact with the physical world—systems like cars and industrial assembly lines. I work with a team of researchers to answer questions about how to design future cyber-physical systems in the context of the latest software systems technologies and applications.

What do you see is the future of your field?

The future of cyber-physical systems is really going to be about how they intertwine with AI going forward. It will be a question of how we enable applications using large foundational models to safely operate in the physical world and how we efficiently gather data to feed back into those models. In the short term, I’m seeing a really exciting confluence of system design for reliable function offloading that allows [soft] real-time applications to take advantage of large models hosted in the cloud. In the long term, the ability to use AI to quickly iterate on system design will change how we think about developing large, complex cyber-physical systems.

Why are you involved in CBI as an Industry Mentor?

Getting to spend part of my time as a CBI industry mentor and sustainability area chair always feels a little bit like I’m cheating. As a CBI mentor, my primary responsibility is to meet with CBI fellows as well as CMU faculty and students to try to connect work going on at Carnegie Mellon with challenges that we see at Bosch. What this job generally boils down to is talking with very talented people about work they are passionate about—which is an absolute pleasure. Further, defining CBI's new sustainability thrust has been a great opportunity to use the energy-harvesting expertise I picked up as a Ph.D. student and to explore topics adjacent to my role at Bosch. Sustainability is also such a pressing, multi-disciplinary topic that carving out CBI's focus has been [and will continue to be] a very meaningful challenge.