Consider this vision of the future: you’re using a dial to scroll through a list of channels on your TV, and you’re feeling a slight bump every time you move down the list. You turn it off, and then take apart your remote (why not?) piece by piece, looking for the battery. But wait, – there is none.

Akash Badshah, in essence, made that.

Badshah, who graduated from Interlake last year after three years, spent last summer working with a research team at UW on a wireless, self-powered haptic feedback device.

“Haptic feedback is a response to touch … pretty much resistance,” explained Badshah, who is enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy – a private New Hampshire high school – and is planning to study next year at Harvey Mudd College. Haptic feedback sounds fancy, but it’s something you encounter every day – like when handles click open or when a phone vibrates, he continued.

The device’s innovation, then, is to provide that feedback wirelessly without using an external energy source. “With iPhones, for example, they use motors to generate the feedback, which takes a tremendous amount of energy,” said Badshah.

The device comes in the form of a prototype general purpose remote, conceived by UW professor Shwetak Patel and executed by Badshah, but it could have connotations far beyond that, especially for sustainability, said Patel.

Badshah ended up taking the lead on the implementation of Patel’s idea into a full project and paper, he said, after he proved more effective and efficient than the group had anticipated.

The resulting paper was not only accepted into ACM SIGCHI, the premier human-computer interaction conference in the world, but won a Best Note award, designating it one of the best short papers at the conference and one of the 15 best papers overall, out of thousands of submitted papers.

No high schooler has ever presented at the conference, let alone won an award.

“This is something graduate students and professors may never accomplish, and he did it at as a high school student,” said Patel. “At UW, we try to set up a successful environment. So he got a lot of mentorship … it was almost as if he was a Ph.D. student. He really saw his ability to contribute, and that gave him confidence.”

The conference was May 7-12 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Needless to say, Badshah was excited.

“It means everything to me,” he said. “This is what I want to be doing, and to get my foot in the door…and to get my name out there is a huge opportunity.”

Even though Badshah’s accomplishment is a first, that’s not to say it will be the last time a high schooler accomplishes something similar.

“The basic circuitry stuff, I learned in high school physics,” said Badshah, “but a lot of it … I looked up during the project, and I think that’s a huge part of what research is – looking up the small shortcuts and techniques to make it work.”

Likewise, it’s unlikely that this accomplishment will be Badshah’s last – after he finishes his undergraduate degree and graduate work in electrical engineering, he says that he wants to continue research in computer-human interaction, which deals with how we interact with our electronics and intersects engineering, computer science, and design.

“I want to help bridge the gap between information and how we interact with it in our electronics,” said Badshah of his interest. “Eventually, I want to be a major player in the field.”

Derek Tsang is an intern at the Bellevue Reporter. He attends Interlake High School.