Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham recently received the prestigious IEEE Computer Society’s Impact Award from the Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC) for her groundbreaking research in secure multimedia data systems. This award is usually presented at the annual IEEE Computer Society  MIPR (Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval) conference. This year, the conference took place in San Jose, CA, on Aug. 8, 2024. She is the first woman to receive this highest technical award from the TCMC.  

Dr. Thuraisingham began her research in secure multimedia data systems in 1988 while she was at Honeywell Inc. She continued with this work while she was at the MITRE Corporation, the National Science Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. She was the first to investigate security for multimedia data systems and, in 1990, presented the first paper in the field at the IFIP Data and Applications Security and Privacy conference. Subsequently, she worked in multimedia data mining.

After she joined UT Dallas in 2004, she teamed up with Dr. Latifur Khan, expanding her focus on topics such as video surveillance and analytics, image mining, geospatial data management and the associated security and privacy concerns.

Additionally, in May 2024, Dr. Thuraisingham received a second Big Data Security and Privacy Pioneer Award at the IEEE Big Data Security Conference in New York City. This award is sponsored by the IEEE CS Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC). Much of this work resulted from a collaboration with Dr. Khan, focusing on big data analytics for insider threat detection integrated with security privacy issues.

They are now focusing on expanding this research to include machine learning and generative AI and applying it to applications such as transportation systems security, privacy and fairness. Dr. Thuraisingham is also involved in tackling governance and policy challenges surrounding AI.

Thuraisingham attributes the strong research culture established in the Department of Computer Science (CS) at UT Dallas for the success she has achieved with organizations such as IEEE and ACM. With more than 50 tenure track faculty conducting cutting-edge research in areas such as AI/machine learning, computer systems, computing theory, cybersecurity, networks/Internet of Things and software engineering, the UT Dallas CS department is one of the largest, most dynamic departments in the United States.