My major goal in teaching is to bridge the gap between the curricula of the two related fields of multimedia systems and information management. In order to address the convergence in the application domains of multimedia and data and information management disciplines, I see an impending need for undergraduate and graduate curricula that will not only educate students separately in each individual domain, but will also provide a common perspective. Most importantly, the curricula must introduce students to the concept of heterogeneity in data, data sources, and systems, as the convergence of different application domains generally means an increase in the heterogeneity of their underlying, relatively less-complex, domains

Both as assistant and as associate professor at the Arizona State University, I worked towards realizing a curriculum that brings multimedia and database education closer. Early on, as an assistant professor at ASU, I introduced a graduate seminar course titled "Multimedia Databases. " Later this course has been transformed into a popular course under the more descriptive title of "Multimedia and Web Databases." This course focuses on the state of the art in nontraditional database applications, including multimedia and Web databases, and prepare students for research in database technologies that address the needs of these applications. In particular, the course covers techniques and challenges associated with storage and query processing for retrieval of inexact data.

I also created a new graduate course, titled``Database Management System Implementation.'' The purpose of this course is to study established techniques for  implementing database management systems through a semester-long project and reading materials covering the classic as well as cutting-edge literature in the area of database systems. The course not only educates students in the internals of database management systems, but it also highlights why and how these systems may be modified in the near future to accommodate the needs of new applications.

These two new courses will fill in the gap between the existing multimedia- and database-related courses and will let students explore challenges in both domains through a more closely structured curriculum.

More recently, in 2007, I am developing a new, undergraduate course, titled ``Data and Information Security.''  This course will introduce students to concepts of authentication, confidentiality, integrity and privacy; data and database security; access control; authentication in distributed systems; trust models; watermarking; and private information retrieval. This course will be taught, first-time, in Fall 2007. While the course is not directly related to multimedia, it will include multimedia authentication and media information hiding techniques, such as watermarking.

Courses commonly taught:
- 408/598 Multimedia Information Systems
- 467/598 Data and Information Security
- 412/598 Database Management
- 510 Database Management System Implementation
- 515 Multimedia and Web Databases