Dr. Venkanna U. obtained his Ph.D. from the National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli (NITT) in 2015. He has been in the teaching profession since 2005 and is currently serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at NIT Warangal. Prior to this, he held the position of Associate Professor at IIITDM Kurnool from August to November 2023, and served as an Assistant Professor at IIIT Naya Raipur from 2016 to 2023. With over 16 years of teaching and research experience, Dr. Venkanna has also held several key administrative roles. He served as Associate Dean (Student Welfare) at IIITDM Kurnool and as Professor-in-Charge of the Department of CSE and the Student Activity Center (SAC) at IIIT-NR.

His research interests span a broad range of topics, including the Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial IoT (IIoT), Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Security, and Security and Privacy in AI models and Autonomous Vehicle (AV) systems.

Dr. Venkanna has authored over 90 research publications, including articles in IEEE Transactions and reputed journals. He has successfully supervised three Ph.D. scholars and is currently guiding four doctoral students working on security challenges in IoT, SDN, and data plane programmability. His work has been recognized with Best Paper Awards at IEEE ANTS 2019 and the 27th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC 2022), a Rank-B conference.

He was elevated to the status of IEEE Senior Member in August 2021. As Principal Investigator (PI), he completed the “Tribe Connect” project funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. He is currently serving as Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) on two ongoing research projects: one on Security in Autonomous Vehicles, funded by TCOE-DoT, and another on 5G Network Management, funded by the IIITB COMET Foundation under NM-ICPS, DST, Government of India.

Additionally, he holds five granted Indian patents and has three more patents published.

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