Dr. Bala Srinivasan, Professor of Information Technology at Monash University in Australia, recently visited the Coimbatore Campus of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham to explore the possibility of collaborative projects with the Amrita faculty.

A Ph. D. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, Dr. Srinivasan has over thirty years of experience in academia, industry and research organizations.

He has authored and edited several books and has published in international journals about multimedia databases, data communications, data mining and distributed systems.

His current research interests include Mobile Databases and Query Processing; Information and Network Security; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Multimedia Semantics and Retrieval Systems and QoS and QBiz in Networks and Web Services.

Amrita students of the Cyber Security and Computer Science Departments attended Dr. Srinivasan’s technical talk on Security in Outsourced Databases. The talk focused on how to secure an outsourced database by encrypting data, while maintaining the ability to query the database correctly.

“Due to increased internet availability and network bandwidth, many organizations use outsourcing as their new information technology paradigm to reduce operational cost and increase profitability,” he said.

This paradigm normally translates into purchasing information technology needs from application service providers; the current manifestation of this paradigm is outsourcing of the organization’s data resources, the so-called backend operations, Dr. Srinivasan noted.

“The service provider takes complete control in providing both hardware and software requirements, at the same time allowing the client to create, modify and query the data,” he added.

Security requirements in such outsourced databases differ from that of conventional in-house databases and Dr. Srinivasan proceeded to provide an overview of the issues, the current state-of-the-art and research challenges in providing security for such outsourced information systems.

Meeting later with faculty and graduate students individually to discuss research issues, Dr. Srinivasan provided an introduction to the PhD program at Monash University. He emphasized the importance of thoroughly assessing a PhD candidate before acceptance, stating, “It’s something like entering a marriage – it’s a contract between student and supervisor.”

He expressed appreciation for the tranquil Amrita campus away from the busyness of city life and the bright, honest and excellent students.

An interactive session for third-year and final-year B.Tech. students helped provided insights on trends in computer science and higher studies in Australia. Students had many questions and concerns, which Dr. Srinivasan patiently addressed.

January 29, 2011
School of Engineering, Coimbatore