Sharad Mehrotra is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is a fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and was a trustee of the VLDB board. Prior to joining UCI, he was a member of the faculty at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the Department of Computer Science where he was the recipient of the C. W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. Mehrotra has also served as a Scientist at Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory immediately after graduating with a Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin (1988-1993), and his undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1988.
Mehrotra's research spans data management, distributed systems, and security and privacy areas. current projects are exploring database technologies for smart spaces, integrating machine learning and generative AI into data processing, and building middleware solutions for privacy compliance. He has published over 350 papers in prestigious conferences and journals 14 of which have been recognized through awards such as best paper awards , most cited paper of the journal, and test of time awards. His pioneering contributions to the field include his work on database as a service which first appeared in 2002 IEEE ICDE and also in ACM SIGMOD 2002 where it has been recognized through the highly prestigious test of time award in 2012. Mehrotra's work on database as a service, including privacy and confidentiality in that context, has helped launch a new field of research which remains an active area of exploration to date with several cloud databases exploring solutions for encryption and query processing in untrusted domains.
Another of Mehrotra's pioneering contributions was in the area of multimedia databases where he introduced concepts from the domain of information retrieval -- in particular, similarity retrieval and relevance feedback -- into content based multimedia retrieval. His pioneering work led to a creation of a sub area within Multimedia conferences with a large amount of follow up work. This work appeared in various IEEE and ACM conferences and journals. A related work on multimedia and time series indexing by Mehrotra won several awards including the best paper award at ACM SIGMOD and ACM Multimedia Information Retrieval conferences.
Mehrotra also helped launch a research direction on Information Technology for First Responders through the NSF funded Large ITR project entitled RESCUE which he led. RESCUE at its peak had over 50 researchers spanning over 7 organizations. More recent work on Mehrotra explores privacy in the context of smart spaces, where funded by DARPA, he led the development of a system entitled TIPPERS that created a campus-scale smart space testbed at UC Irvine to help promote research in privacy and security. Several of his publications from RESCUE and TIPPERS have been recognized through awards including the best paper award at IEEE Percom that built SmartSpec - a simulation tool for generating smart space data. Mehrotra has also been a pioneer in the area of data cleaning methodologies leading the direction of just-in-time cleaning to speed up data analytics.