Saraju Mohanty

Saraju Mohanty is an Indian-American professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. He is the founding director of the Smart Electronic Systems Laboratory (SESL) there. He has also served in leadership roles in international professional organizations and academic journals, including the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Consumer Electronics Society. He is the founding Dean of Artificial Intelligence Technology Institute (AiTI) at the SRM University-AP.

Mohanty is a researcher in the areas of "smart electronics for smart cities/villages", "smart healthcare", "smart agriculture", "application-Specific things for efficient edge computing", and "methodologies for digital and mixed-signal hardware". He has made significant research contributions to security by design (SbD) for electronic systems, hardware-assisted security (HAS) and protection, high-level synthesis of digital signal processing (DSP) hardware, and mixed-signal integrated circuit computer-aided design and electronic design automation.

Mohanty has been the editor-in-chief (EiC) of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine during 2016-2021. He has held the Chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Very Large Scale Integration during 2014-2018. He holds 6 granted patents in the areas of his research, and has published 600 research articles and 5 books. He is ranked among top 2% faculty around the world in Computer Science and Engineering discipline as per the standardized citation metric adopted by the Public Library of Science Biology journal. Mohanty received a Glorious India Award – Rich and Famous NRIs of America in 2017 for his contributions to the discipline.

Education

Saraju Mohanty started his schooling at Lodhachua, Nayagarh, Odisha. After graduating from Badagada Government High School, Bhubaneswar in 1988, Mohanty completed a 10+2 Science degree from Rajdhani College, Bhubaneswar in 1990. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar, Orissa University of Agriculture and Technology, in 1995.

In 1999 Mohanty completed a master's degree in engineering in Systems Science and Automation from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. His thesis mentors at IISc were Professor K. R. Ramakrishnan and Professor Mohan Kankanhalli (IEEE Fellow) with whom he co-authored his first peer-reviewed paper.

Mohanty with K. R. Ramakrishnan, Mohan Kankanhalli, and Nasir Memon at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2000 at New York City

Mohanty earned a PhD in computer engineering from the University of South Florida in 2003. His PhD mentor was Professor Nagarajan Ranganathan (IEEE Fellow and AAAS Fellow).

Scientific contributions

Smart Healthcare

Mohanty's research in smart healthcare has focused on Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), healthcare cyber-physical systems (H-CPS), involving wearable devices, AI, and security and privacy. His work includes iKardo, an intelligent ECG device for automatic identification of critical heartbeats; MyWear, a smart garment for continuous vital-sign monitoring; SaYoPillow, a privacy-assured IoMT framework for stress monitoring; and iGLU, a secure non-invasive glucose monitoring and automatic insulin-delivery system. His research has also addressed cardiovascular disease prediction using ECG, seizure detection from EEG signals, and AI-based diagnosis using multi-channel EEG. His work has additionally examined security and privacy in wearable and implantable medical devices and secure architectures for connected healthcare systems.

Smart Agriculture

Mohanty's research in smart agriculture has contributed to the development of Internet-of-Agro-Things (IoAT) and agriculture cyber-physical systems (A-CPS) that integrate IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, edge computing, and intelligent sensing. His early work included gCrop, an Internet-of-Leaf-Things system for monitoring crop growth, and dCrop, a deep-learning framework for crop disease prediction. His sCrop system introduced a solar-powered IoAT device for automatic plant-disease prediction, crop selection, and irrigation, combining sensor nodes, imaging, convolutional neural networks, and mobile visualization for sustainable agriculture. His subsequent eCrop framework addressed automatic crop-damage estimation using a convolutional Siamese neural network and was designed to support automated agricultural insurance claim assessment. More recent works have extended this research to plant-disease detection and damage estimation, identification of disease hotspots using graph-based methods, disease-severity estimation using graph neural networks, and autonomous weed management through the WeedOut framework. His broader work has also examined the architecture, technologies, applications, and challenges of smart agriculture and has contributed to comprehensive frameworks for integrating IoT, AI, sensing, and intelligent automation into agricultural systems.

Contributions to security and IP protection of consumer electronic systems

Mohanty has worked on the Secure Digital Camera (SDC) for real-time security and IP protection at the source end of the information. In the Internet of Things (IoT) framework the SDC can be a sensor node (aka thing) for real-time trustworthy sensing. The SDC can have applications where still image or video digital cameras are needed, such as secure digital video broadcasting, secure video surveillance, electronic passport, and identity card processing. The secure digital camera (SDC) has been adopted by various researchers worldwide.

Contributions to high-level synthesis of digital signal processing (DSP) hardware

Mohanty has worked to high-level synthesis (HLS) or architecture-level synthesis of digital signal processing (DSP) hardware. His methods address energy consumption and power fluctuation in DSP hardware which are heart of consumer electronic systems such that battery life and battery efficiency increases. His nanoelectronic-based High-level synthesis techniques addresses the issue of process variations, the primary issue of nanoelectronic technology, during the high-level synthesis itself before the digital design moves to the detailed and lower levels of design abstractions, such as logic-level or transistor-level.

Contributions to analog electronics and mixed-signal circuits

Mohanty has worked on design space exploration and optimization of analog/mixed-signal system on a chip (AMS-SoC) which is essentially the technology representation of a consumer electronics such as a smart mobile phone. The key feature of these design flows is the need for only two manual layout (or physical design) iterations which saves significant design effort. These fast design flows rely on accurate metamodels of the analog and mixed-signal circuit components. This research advances the state-of-the art in Design for Excellence (DfX) or Design for X, such as Design for Variability (DfV) and Design for Cost (DfC).

Selected editor and conference chair positions

Editor-in-chief of the IEEE Consumer electronics Magazine (MCE). Steering committee member, IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), 2018—present. Associate editor, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD) Associate editor, ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC) Associate editor, IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology (TNANO) Associate editor, IET Circuits, Devices & Systems Journal (CDS) Steering Committee Chair, IEEE International Symposium on Smart Electronic Systems (iSES) Steering Committee vice-chair, IEEE-CS Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI) Steering Committee vice-chair, OITS International Conference on Information Technology (OCIT) General Chair, IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), January 12–14, 2018, Las Vegas, USA. General Chair, IFIP International Internet of Things Conference (IFIP-IoT), November 2--3, 2023, DFW Metroplex, USA.

Awards Fulbright Specialist Award by U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and World Learning in 2021. IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Chester Sall Award in 2020 for the Second place best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics in the year 2018. IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Outstanding Service Award for 2019 for leadership contributions to the IEEE Consumer Electronics society. IEEE-CS-TCVLSI Distinguished Leadership Award for outstanding services to the IEEE and to the VLSI research community in 2018. The PROSE Award for best Textbook in Physical Sciences & Mathematics category from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in 2016. The UNT Toulouse Scholars Award for outstanding scholarship and teaching achievements in 2016–2017. Best Paper Award at the OITS/IEEE International Conference on Information Technology (OCIT), 2023.