IEEE Biometrics Council recognizes Akshay Agarwal for research on AI and machine learning

By Nicole Capozziello

Agarwal, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, defended his dissertation, “Panoptic Defenses for Secure Computer Vision” in December 2020 at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, India.

“Congratulations to Akshay for this prestigious award,” says Jinhui Xu, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “I look forward to seeing more of the exciting research that he will do at UB.” 

Agarwal’s research includes building a trustworthy space to securely use the automatic systems in the world around us, whether in the form of the automatic payment or device unlocking. The potential real-world impact of his work includes securing artificial intelligence algorithms from severe threats such as deepfakes and adversarial perturbations, which can lead to more trust in digital media.

Agarwal came to the University at Buffalo in January 2021 to continue his work in the area of biometrics with SUNY Empire Innovation Professor Nalini Ratha.

An IEEE member, Agarwal’s past involvement with IEEE includes publications in multiple IEEE journals and related presentations at conferences. He has also been a reviewer for various IEEE journals. Agarwal’s publishing record includes more than 40 research articles, including in publications through IEEE and AAAI.

Agarwal’s past awards include the Dean's Award for Innovation, Research, and Development (2017 and 2018) from IIIT-Delhi, India. He was also one of only 200 scholars selected as a Young Researcher selected by the Scientific Committee of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation (HLFF) to participate in the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September 2019.

Prior to joining the University at Buffalo, he was a research assistant professor at Texas A&M University.