Sharad Mehrotra

Sharad Mehrotra is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine and Director of the Center for Emergency Response Technologies (CERT) at UCI. He also serves as the Director and PI of the RESCUE project (Responding to Crisis and Unexpected Events) which, funded by NSF through its large ITR program, spans 7 schools and consists of 60 members. He is associated with the Cal-IT2 institute — a multidisciplinary research facility spanning University of California, Irvine and University of California, San Diego. He is the recipient of Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor Award in 2005. Prior to joining UCI, me was a member of the faculty at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the Department of Computer Science where he was the recipient of the C. W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. Mehrotra has also served as a Scientist at Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory immediately after graduating with a Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin(1988-1993).

Mehrotra’s research expertise is in data management and distributed systems areas in which he has made many pioneering contributions. Two such contributions include the concept of “database as a service” and “use of information retrieval techniques, particularly relevance feedback, in multimedia search”. Mehrotra is a recipient of numerous best paper nominations and awards including SIGMOD Best Paper award in 2001 for a paper entitled “Locally Adaptive Dimensionality Reduction for Indexing Large Time Series Databases”, Best of VLDB 1994 submissions for a paper entitled “Concurrency Control in Hierarchical Multidatabase System”, best paper award in DASFAA 2004 for the paper entitled “Efficient Execution of Aggregation Queries over Encrypted Databases”, best paper award nomination for a paper entitled Neighborhoods: A framework for enabling web-based synchronous collaboration and hierarchical Navigation at HIICS, 1996, and a best student paper award at IEEE Workshop on Multimodal Sentient Computing: Sensors, Algorithms and Systems (WMSC 2007) held in conjunction with IEEE CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) 2007.

Mehrotra’s current research focuses on building sentient spaces using multimodal sensors, data privacy, and data quality. Mehrotra’s recent research, particularly, in the context of RESCUE & CERT has focused on situational awareness from multimodal input including conversational speech data. Many of his research contributions have been incorporated into software artifacts which are now in use at various first responder partner sites.

Education

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1993