Balakrishnan (Prabha) Prabhakaran
PhD
About
Professor Balakrishnan Prabhakaran is the Director of the AI Plus Institute and an Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University at Albany.
Dr. Prabhakaran served as program director for the National Science Foundation’s Human-Centered Computing Program in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division from 2019 to 2023 and as "theme lead" for the NSF AI Institute on Human-AI Interaction.
Research
Balakrishnan (Prabha) Prabhakaran on Google Scholar
Research Interests
Dr. Prabhakaran works in the broad area of collaborative, mixed reality systems for healthcare and STEM education.
These systems involve multi-modal devices, such as haptic devices giving force feedback and body sensors, integrated with mixed reality.
Some of these systems have undergone clinical trials for use by amputees to manage phantom pain and for remote evaluation of stroke patients in a clinical setting, as well as in a home setting without expert guidance.
Grants/Funding
Dr. Prabhakaran's research has been funded by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO) and the US-IGNITE Program.
Additional Information
Awards & Honors
Dr. Prabhakaran received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award FY 2003 for his proposal on Animation Databases.
He was selected as an (Association for Computing Machinery) ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2011.
Service & Outreach
Dr. Prabhakaran has been serving in the steering committees for several top research conferences, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Health Informatics (ICHI).
He is serving on the editorial boards of high-impact journals such as Elsevier’s Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Springer’s Journal of Health Informatics Research. He is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE MultiMedia.
Dr. Prabhakaran has also served as General Chair and Technical Program Committee Chair for several important research conferences in health informatics and multimedia.