The Computing Research Association and Computing Community Consortium recently named Amit Pande, a computer engineering PhD student at Iowa State University, a 2010 Computing Innovation Fellow. The fellowship provides Pande financial support to conduct postdoctoral research in video encryption and security.
“We plan to develop new strategies for video encryption that can significantly reduce the computational requirements of multimedia encryption, making it more compatible with search and retrieval requirements of digital libraries, power requirements on embedded systems and minimizing any compression losses,” Pande said.
Pande’s research spans three major research thrust areas: multimedia compression, security and trust, and embedded computing systems. His specific research will address concerns for security and privacy of targeted objects and organizations. The research could impact police departments and U.S. military who conduct widespread video surveillance in cities and on the battlefield.
“This project has the potential of bringing a security focus to image processing and computer vision algorithms themselves, and power-awareness to the design of secure multimedia systems,” Pande said.
Pande’s postdoctoral research expands on his PhD thesis work, which delved into challenges in hardware implementation and security integration of compressed multimedia streams, such as video messaging, video conferencing and video surveillance. While most researchers study these issues independently, Pande has integrated those issues to solve them together. His PhD research at Iowa State focused on developing a new generation of video encryption algorithms to augment video compression modules to provide low-overhead, low-cost, property-preserving encryption of mission-critical video streams. Pande’s major professor for his PhD work was Joseph Zambreno, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State.
Pande will start his fellowship in September 2010 and conduct his postdoctoral research as a Computing Innovation Fellow at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis), under the mentorship of Prasant Mohapatra, a professor and chair in the UC-Davis computer science department.
The Computing Innovation Fellow program is sponsored by the Computing Research Association and the Computing Community Consortium, with funding from the National Science Foundation. Only about 10 percent of applicants (5 percent of international applicants) are chosen each year. In 2010, only 47 awards were given to scholars nationwide. This is the second year these fellowships have been awarded.
Contacts:
Dana McCullough, communications specialist, 262 264-7810, schmidtd@iastate.edu
Joseph Zambreno, assistant professor, 515 294-3312, zambreno@iastate.edu