Nalini Venkatasubramanian Named an IEEE Fellow

For years, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, a computer science professor in UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), has been researching safe and adaptive middleware in support of building community-scale resilient Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The IEEE Fellow program, which honors select IEEE members for extraordinary accomplishments in their field, is recognizing Venkatasubramanian’s work in this area, selecting her to the IEEE Fellow Class of 2025. She was chosen for her “contributions to the foundations of adaptive software and its application in enhancing community safety.”

“My work is rooted in high-impact applications to societal problems such as emergency response, assisted living technologies, smart-water infrastructure and public safety,” she says. “Software adaptability is instrumental, whether in a network of wildfire cameras, a smart building or assisted living center, water infrastructure or a transportation network,” she says.

Venkatasubramanian’s research explores dynamic provisioning and actuation of different resources, as well as how that plays out in various domains and scenarios. “It’s not just about the theory,” she says. “It’s also about the impact of the approach in designing real-world, customizable systems.” Her research has led to key contributions in smart firefighting, disaster response and community-scale alerting platforms. Her work has focused on creating actionable information flow in the presence of uncertainty.

She was thrilled to be named an IEEE Fellow and hopes the exposure contributes to further research into building resilient software systems. “I’m deeply honored to belong to this distinguished group of scientists and engineers,” she says. “I hope our work can influence communities to design self-adaptive, large-scale distributed systems with real-world safety implications.”

Other ICS IEEE Fellows include Pierre Baldi, Michael Carey, Nikil Dutt, Michael Franz, Michael Goodrich, Ramesh Jain, Sven Koenig, Chen Li, Cristina Lopes, Sharad Mehrotra, Alexandru Nicolau, Marios Papaefthymiou, Padhraic Smyth and Gene Tsudik.

— Shani Murray