Mehrotra Named ACM Fellow
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Sharad Mehrotra as one of 68 ACM Fellows for 2023. As noted in the announcement, the Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments.
Mehrotra, who has been a faculty member of UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) for more than 25 years, was recognized for his impactful research contributions in the areas of data management, multimedia information retrieval, and emergency response.
His seminal work includes efforts with graduate students and IBM collaborators back in 2001 to build a “database as a service,” anticipating the future DBaaS world. A related SIGMOD 2002 paper, “Executing SQL Over Encrypted Data in the Database-Service-Provider Model,” won the ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award in 2012.
Another seminal contribution relates to multimedia retrieval and indexing, including development of the Multimedia Analysis & Retrieval (MARS) software system. He also built the UCI database group, now called the Information Systems Group, and helped lead a large-scale and successful NSF project on information technology for emergency response. With $12.5M in NSF funding, the RESCUE Project has resulted in many innovations, including software deployed at response agencies.
Some of Mehrotra’s more recent projects span IoT data management, privacy, security, outsourced data management, data quality, and homeland security. In particular, his current work is focused on building novel data management technology for smart spaces.
“With the ubiquitous deployment of diverse sensing technologies, we are reaching the stage when it would be possible to continuously capture and analyze — in real-time — the evolving state of the adoption of IoT and smart space technologies,” he says. “Management of such data and creation of smart spaces offers a large number of challenges ranging from semantic modeling of smart spaces, integrating machine learning into databases, supporting scalable analytics, to that of security and privacy.” To address such challenges, Mehrotra and his team are developing the TIPPERS (Testbed for IoT-based Privacy-Preserving PERvasive Spaces) system.
“This award acknowledges not only my efforts but also the contributions of numerous students, colleagues, and collaborators I have had the good fortune to work with,” says Mehrotra, noting his “delightful surprise” at being named an ACM Fellow. “I feel honored to have received this recognition.”
Mehrotra joins the following ICS colleagues who are also ACM Fellows: Pierre Baldi, Michael J. Carey, Rina Dechter, Paul Dourish, Nikil Dutt, David Eppstein, Michael Franz, Michael Goodrich, Sandy Irani, Ramesh Jain, Gary Olson, Judy Olson, Padhraic Smyth, Richard Taylor and Gene Tsudik.
— Shani Murray