Title: Towards Building an Interdisciplinary Research Program
Abstract: Multidisciplinary research is becoming increasingly important for a successful research career, and electrical and computer engineering disciplines are serving as core research areas for several application domains ranging from automations to healthcare to environment. At times it requires out of the box thinking to explore possible multidisciplinary collaborations. In this talk I will share my experiences in building a diverse multidisciplinary program, and outline recent projects, related research problems, and our contributions. In particular I will discuss our innovative results related to: 1) MotionSearch: a framework for modeling motion events in videos, 2) Management of Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks and Compressive Sensing, 3) Big Data Machine Learning for EHRs related to Nursing Care of Hospitalized Patients, 4) Big Data Proteomics, and 5) Hardware Reconfigurable Architectures for Realtime Applications. I will also share my experiences in entrepreneurship and technology transfer.
Biography: Ashfaq A. Khokhar received his Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California, in 1993. After his Ph.D., he spent two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. In 1995, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware, where he first served as Assistant Professor and then as Associate Professor. In Fall 2000, Dr. Khokhar joined UIC in the Department of Computer Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he served as Professor and Director Graduate Studies, till 2013. In Fall of 2010, Dr. Khokhar has also founded a successful startup company, Video Analytica, Inc. that is developing smart video camera technologies to recognize events of interest in realtime. In 2013 Dr. Khokhar joined the Department of ECE at IIT, where he currently serves as Professor and Chair. He also serves on the advisory boards of leading industry organization and venture capital funds.
Dr. Khokhar has published over 265 technical papers and book chapters in refereed conferences and journals in the areas of wireless networks, multimedia systems, data mining, and high performance computing. His research work has attracted over $11 million of federal, state and industry funds. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 1998. His research work has received numerous best paper awards, including the most recent Best Short Paper award in MSWiM 2013 for his work entitled “Voronoi Trees for Hierarchical In-Network Data and Space Abstractions in Wireless Sensor Networks. He has served as Program Chair of multiple conferences, including: BiCoB 2012, Globecom 2009, PDCS 2004, ICPP 2004, and also serves on the editorial boards of multiple journals. He is a Fellow of IEEE for his contributions to multimedia computing and databases.