UT-ECE PhD graduate, Vishal Monga, has accepted a tenure-track position at Pennsylvania State University for fall 2009. Monga's PhD research, supervised by Professor Brian L. Evans, was in a problem in multimedia security and mining known as perceptual image hashing. Perceptual image hashing helps index large image databases for efficient search and retrieval, makes watermarking images easier, and strengthens image/document authentication against attacks.

Monga received his BSEE degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in 2001, and his MS and PhD degrees from The University of Texas at Austin in 2003 and 2005, respectively. He has been working at Xerox Research since graduation. Prof. Evans notes that Dr. Monga is already a seasoned researcher and accomplished teacher, and is well prepared to be a successful professor at Penn State.