Dr. Balakrishnan Prabhakaran

A Professor of Computer Science, in the University of Texas at Dallas, he works in the area of multimedia systems. Currently, he is focusing on: video and health-care data analytics; streaming of 3D video, animations, and deformable 3D models; content protection and authentication of multimedia objects; Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for streaming multimedia data in wireless adhoc and mesh networks; and collaborative virtual environments. In the past, he has worked on multimedia databases, authoring & presentation, resource management, and scalable web-based multimedia presentation servers. He received a Bachelor of Engineering Electronics and Communication degree from Madurai-Kamaraj University in1986, and his Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai in 1990 and 1995 respectively. He has published several research papers in prestigious conferences and journals in this area. He received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award FY 2003 for his proposal on Animation Databases. Dr. Prabhakaran is General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia 2011. He is also Technical Program Co-Chair of IEEE WoWMoM 2012 (World of Wireless, Mobile, and Multimedia Networks). He served as the TPC Co-Chair of IEEE ISM 2010 (International Symposium on Multimedia). He is a Member of the Executive Council of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) and is the Co-Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC) Special Interest Group on Video Analytics (SIGVA). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM SIGMM (Special Interest Group on Multimedia) web magazine. He is Member of the Editorial board of Multimedia Systems Journal (Springer) and Multimedia Tools and Applications journal (Springer). He has served as guest-editor (special issue on Multimedia Authoring and Presentation) for ACM Multimedia Systems journal. He has also served as program committee member on several multimedia conferences and workshops. He has also presented tutorials in several conferences on topics such as network resource management, adaptive multimedia presentations, and scalable multimedia servers. In addition, he was a 2011recipient of the Distinguished Scientists award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The Distinguished Member Grade ACM Award recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field. His research has been funded by Federal Agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and USA Army Research Office (ARO). He is currently the Principal Investigator of a $2.4 million NSF research grant that involves 8 researchers from different disciplines. This research project explores multi-modality in 3D Tele-Immersion. He has also received generous research funding from industries, research laboratories and consortiums such as QuEST Forum, Texas Instruments, Alcatel-Lucent, Texas Emerging Technology Fund, Texas Medical (TexMed) Consortium. In effect, he has contributed to nearly $10 million in research funding in the last several years. He has authored or co-authored numerous publications including: "Temporal Models and Their Applications in Multimedia Information Retrieval," ?Design and Management of Multimedia Information Systems: Opportunities and Challenges?, Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, USA , 2001; ?Mobile Computing Environments for Multimedia Systems?, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, with Mohsen, eds.; "Multimedia Database Management Systems?, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 1996; and "Multimedia Databases," Encyclopedia of Multimedia, CRC Press, with B. Thuraisingham and L. Khan.