Known for his work in 3D video, animations, and deformable 3D models — a form of multimedia data widely used in entertainment and medical fields — Prabhakaran has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research has focused on: video and health-care data analytics; streaming of 3D video, animations, and deformable 3D models; content protection and authentication of multimedia objects; Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for streaming multimedia data in wireless ad hoc and mesh networks; and collaborative virtual environments. He has also worked on multimedia databases, authoring and presentation, resource management, and scalable web-based multimedia presentation servers.
Prabhakaran received a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication from Madurai-Kamaraj University in 1986, and his Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, in 1990 and 1995 respectively. He has published several research papers in prestigious conferences and journals in this area and received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award FY 2003 for his proposal on Animation Databases.
He has served as General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia 2011 and as Technical Program Co-Chair of IEEE WoWMoM 2012 (World of Wireless, Mobile, and Multimedia Networks). Prabhakaran also served as TPC Co-Chair of IEEE ISM 2010 (International Symposium on Multimedia). He has been a Member of the Executive Council of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) and Co-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC) Special Interest Group on Video Analytics (SIGVA).
He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM SIGMM (Special Interest Group on Multimedia) web magazine and as a member of the editorial boards of the Multimedia Systems Journal (Springer) and Multimedia Tools and Applications journal (Springer). Prabhakaran also served as guest editor (special issue on Multimedia Authoring and Presentation) for the ACM Multimedia Systems journal and as a program committee member on several multimedia conferences and workshops. He has additionally presented tutorials at several conferences on topics such as network resource management, adaptive multimedia presentations, and scalable multimedia servers.
In 2011, Prabhakaran received the Distinguished Scientists award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The Distinguished Member Grade ACM Award recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.
His research has been funded by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the USA Army Research Office (ARO). He has served as Principal Investigator of a $2.4 million NSF research grant involving 8 researchers from different disciplines, a project that explored multi-modality in 3D Tele-Immersion. Prabhakaran also received generous research funding from industries, research laboratories, and consortiums such as QuEST Forum, Texas Instruments, Alcatel-Lucent, Texas Emerging Technology Fund, and the Texas Medical (TexMed) Consortium, contributing in total to nearly $10 million in research funding over several years.
He authored or co-authored numerous publications including: "Temporal Models and Their Applications in Multimedia Information Retrieval"; "Design and Management of Multimedia Information Systems: Opportunities and Challenges," Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, USA, 2001; "Mobile Computing Environments for Multimedia Systems," Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, with Mohsen, eds.; "Multimedia Database Management Systems," Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 1996; and "Multimedia Databases," Encyclopedia of Multimedia, CRC Press, with B. Thuraisingham and L. Khan.
