Nalini Venkatasubramanian

•Distinguished Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine

•Director, IoTSity NSF Site REU Program

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Biography

Nalini Venkatasubramanian, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of the Center for Emergency Response Technologies at the University of California, Irvine. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998. Venkatasubramanian's research focuses on distributed systems, adaptive middleware, cyberphysical systems, and Internet-of-Things, with particular emphasis on applications in disaster response, smart infrastructure, and community resilience and she has published over 350 peer-reviewed articles on these topics.

Venkatasubramanian is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Class of 2025, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Class of 2024. She is also an ACM Distinguished Engineer (2021) and received the IEEE Distinguished Contributor Award in 2024. Her research has been recognized with multiple best paper awards, including the Mark Weiser Best Paper Award at IEEE PERCOM 2022. Nalini received the 2025 CNOM Test-of-Time Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Network Operations and Management and the IEEE Communications Society. She has served as General Co-Chair and Program Co-Chair for numerous conferences, including ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) and ACM Middleware, and holds editorial positions on several journals including ACM Transactions on Internet Technologies and ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems.

Venkatasubramanian has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on numerous research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Homeland Security, and NIST, with total funding exceeding $30 million. Her work has resulted in the development of multiple software systems and platforms, including TIPPERS (a testbed for IoT-based privacy-preserving pervasive spaces), SWADE (a data exchange for smart water infrastructures), and CaReDeX (a secure data exchange for disaster resilience in aging communities). She has directed the IoTSity NSF Site REU Program since 2017 and has mentored 30 Ph.D. students who have gone on to positions at institutions including Google, Meta, IBM Research, and academic faculty positions.

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Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998
M.S. in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1991
B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering, University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore University, 1989

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Distinctions

Fellow of the American Association of Advancement in Science (AAAS Fellow), 2024
Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE Fellow), 2025
IEEE Distinguished Contributor Award, 2024
ACM Distinguished Engineer, 2021
N²Women: Stars in Computer Networking and Communications (IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Computer Society), 2020
National Science Foundation Career Award, Networking Research Program, 1999
Mark Weiser Best Paper Award, IEEE Intl. Conf. on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PERCOM), 2022
Best Paper Award, IEEE Intl. Conf. on Smart Computing (SmartCOMP), 2020
Best Paper Award, The 18th IEEE Intl. Symp. on Network Computing and Applications (NCA), 2019
Best Paper Award, 37th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), 2018
Fellow of the International Academy of Artificial Intelligence Sciences (AAIS Fellow), Class of 2026., 2026
CNOM Test-of-Time Award, IEEE Technical Committee on Network Operations and Management(CNOM), IEEE Communications Society, 2025
Elected Member, National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (NAAI), 2026

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Areas of Expertise

Distributed Systems
Adaptive Middleware Architectures
Internet-of-Things Data Management
Cyberphysical Infrastructure Resilience
Emergency Response Technologies
Privacy-Preserving Smart Spaces
Edge Computing Frameworks

Recent Publications

Li Y., Liu F., Chang T.-Y., Hsu C.-H., Venkatasubramanian N., “Microservice provisioning and event-driven adaptation in heterogeneous IoT settings” (opens in new tab), Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 118, 2026.
Venkatasubramanian N., Liu F., Sarwar Y., “Experiences with Composability for Resilient IoT Systems” (opens in new tab), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. LNCS 16120, pp. 279-306, 2026.
Ryan Hildebrant, Rahul Bhope, Sharad Mehrotra, Christopher Tull, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “DIM-SUM: Dynamic IMputation for Smart Utility Management” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, vol. 18, pp. 4451-4464, 2025.
Vishal Chakraborty, Youri Kaminsky, Sharad Mehrotra, Felix Naumann, Faisal Nawab, Primal Pappachan, Mohammad Sadoghi, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “Meaningful Data Erasure in the Presence of Dependencies” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, vol. 18, pp. 3435-3448, 2025.
Tung-Chun Chang, Chih-Chun Wu, Georgios Bouloukakis, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “SmartParcels: Constructing Smart Communities Through Human-in-the-Loop Urban IoT Planning” (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Internet of Things, vol. 6, 2025.
Andrew Chio, Jian Peng, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “STEP: Towards a Semantics-Aware Framework for Instrumenting Community-Scale Infrastructure” (opens in new tab), Data-Centric Engineering (DCE), vol. 5, 2024.
C. Wu, C. Lai, N. Venkatasubramanian, C. -H. Hsu, “A Software-Defined Approach to Enabling Network Controllers for Smart Environment Digital Twins” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science Cloudcom, pp. 33-40, 2024. Presented at 2024 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Rummana Rahman, Cheng-Hsun Lin, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “A Measurement-informed Approach to Modeling Underground IoT Communications” (opens in new tab), IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, 2024. Presented at IEEE Conference on Vehicular Technology (VTC).
Andrew Chio, Daokun Jiang, Peeyush Gupta, Georgios Bouloukakis, Roberto Yus, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “SmartSPEC: A Framework to Generate Customizable, Semantics-based Smart Space Datasets” (opens in new tab), Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 93, 2023.
Aaron L. Allred, Erin M. Boomershine, Christopher B. Davison, Jayci L. Wimmer, Celeste Penney, Julie Rousseau, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “Analyzing Student Experiences and Career Pathways for Healthcare Student Volunteers Participating in a Disaster Response Drill: A Mixed-Methods Study”, CTE Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, 2023.
Shantanu Sharma, Nisha Panwar, Peeyush Gupta, Shanshan Han, Guoxi Wang, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “Quest: Privacy-Preserving Monitoring of Network Data: A System for Organizational Response to Pandemics” (opens in new tab), IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, vol. 15, pp. 1233-1250, 2022.
Roberto Yus, Georgios Bouloukakis, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “The Semiotic Ecosystem: A Semantic Bridge between IoT Devices and Smart Spaces” (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Internet Technologies, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. Article 76, 2022.
Zhang Z., Johnson C., Venkatasubramanian N., Ren S., “Process scenario discovery from event logs based on activity and timing information” (opens in new tab), Journal of Systems Architecture, vol. 125, 2022.
Min-han Tsai, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, “Multi-level Feature Driven Storage Management of Surveillance Videos” (opens in new tab), Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 76, 2021.
Praveen Venkateswaran, Kyle Edward Benson, Chia-Ying Hsieh, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “REAM: A Framework for Resource Efficient Adaptive Monitoring of Community Spaces” (opens in new tab), Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 76, 2021.
Nisha Panwar, Shantanu Sharma, Guoxi Wang, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “CANOPY: A Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Token Ring based Communication Protocol for Smart Homes” (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (ACM TCPS), vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 3:1-3:34, 2021.
Georgios Bouloukakis, Kyle Benson, Luca Scalzotto, Paolo Bellavista, Casey Grant, Valérie Issarny, Sharad Mehrotra, Ioannis Moscholios, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “PrioDeX: a Data Exchange Middleware for Efficient Event Prioritization in SDN-based IoT systems”, ACM Transactions on the Internet of Things, pp. 1-30, 2021.
H. Nguyen, M. Uddin, N. Venkatasubramanian, “REAPS: Quasi-active Fault Tolerance for Big Data Publish-Subscribe Systems” (opens in new tab), Proceedings 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data Big Data 2021, pp. 368-375, 2021. Presented at 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data).
Fangqi Liu, Tzu-Yi Fan, Casey Grant, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “DragonFly: Drone-Assisted High-Rise Monitoring for Fire Safety” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, vol. 2021-September, pp. 331-342, 2021. Presented at 40TH IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2021).
Praveen Venkateswaran, Vinod Muthusamy, Vatche Isahagian, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “Environment Agnostic Invariant Risk Minimization for Classification of Sequential Datasets” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1615-1624, 2021. Presented at ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD 2021).

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Most Cited Publications

Reza Rahimi, Jian Ren, Harold Liu, Athanasios Vasilakos, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “Mobile Cloud Computing: A Survey, State of the Art and Future Directions” (opens in new tab), Mobile Networks and Applications, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 133-143, 2014.
D. Wu, D. I. Arkhipov, M. Kim, C. L. Talcott, A. C. Regan, J. A. McCann, N. Venkatasubramanian, “ADDSEN: Adaptive Data Processing and Dissemination for Drone Swarms in Urban Sensing” (opens in new tab), IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 66, no. 2, pp. 183-198, 2017.
Qi Han, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “Energy-Efficient Data Collection in Distributed Sensor Environments” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, vol. 24, pp. 590-597, 2004. Presented at IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2004), March 2004.
Shivajit Mohapatra, Nikil Dutt, Alex Nicolau, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “DYNAMO: A Cross-Layer Framework for End-to-End QoS and Energy Optimization in Mobile Handheld Devices” (opens in new tab), IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication (JSAC), vol. 25, pp. 722-737, 2007.
Nalini Venkatasubramanian, Srinivas Ramanathan, “Load Management for Distributed Video Servers”, Proceedings International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pp. 528-535, 1997. Presented at IEEE Intl. Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 1997.
S. Pasricha, M. Luthra, S. Mohapatra, N. Dutt, N. Venkatasubramanian, “Dynamic Backlight Adaptation for Low-Power Handheld Devices” (opens in new tab), IEEE Design and Test of Computers, vol. 21, pp. 398-405, 2004.
Kyle Benson, Charles Fracchia, Guoxi Wang, Qiuxi Zhu, Serene Almomen, John Cohn, Luke D'Arcy, Daniel Hoffman, Matthew Makai, Julien Stamatakis, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “SCALE: Safe Community Awareness and Alerting Leveraging the Internet of Things” (opens in new tab), IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 53, pp. 27-34, 2015.
Grit Denker, Nikil Dutt, Sharad Mehrotra, Mark-Oliver Stehr, Carolyn Talcott, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “Resilient, Dependable CyberPhysical Systems: A Middleware Perspective” (opens in new tab), Journal of Internet Services and Applications, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 41-49, 2012.
Qi Han, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “AutoSeC: An integrated Middleware Framework for Dynamic Service Brokering”, IEEE Distributed Systems Online, vol. 2, no. 7, 2001.
Qiuxi Zhu, Yusuf Sarwar, Chenghsin Hsu, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “Spatiotemporal Scheduling for Crowd Augmented Urban Sensing” (opens in new tab), Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM, vol. 2018-April, pp. 1997-2005, 2018. Presented at IEEE INFOCOM 2018.
Zhijing Qin, Grit Denker, Carlo Gianelli, Paolo Bellavista, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “A Software Defined Networking Architecture for the Internet-of-Things. ”, IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS) 2014. 5-9 May 2014, pp. 1 - 9, 2014. , IEEE , pp. 1-9, 2014. Presented at IEEE NOMS 2014.

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Contact Information

Website: https://nalini.ics.uci.edu/

Email: nalini@uci.edu

Phone: (949) 824-5898

Address: 2082 Bren Hall

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Last updated on 8/28/2026.