Bovik Receives Engineering Awards

Prof. Al Bovik was awarded the Billy & Claude R. Hocott Award by the UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering. The objective of the award is to recognize faculty members who have made significant contributions in furthering the profession of engineering through documented research conducted while associated with The University of Texas at Austin. Of primary importance is that the work of the recipient must have brought significant credit to the engineering profession and been judged most worthy by the recipient's peers. Further, there shall be substantial evidence that the research leadership of the candidate is recognized by his or her peers on both the state and national level.

On the national level, Bovik was named a Fellow of the Society of Photo-Optic and Instrumentation Engineers. Prof. Bovik also gave Plenary Addresses at the following meetings: the Southwest Symposium on Image Analysis and Interpretation in Santa Fe in March 2008; the First IEEE International Workshop on IP Multimedia Communications at the Virgin Islands in August 2008; the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in San Diego on October 16 2008; and the First IEEE Region 10 Conference in Hyderabad, India on November 20 2008.

Alan Conrad Bovik was born in Kirkwood, MO on June 25, 1958. He received the B.S. degree in Computer Engineering in 1980, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1982 and 1984, respectively, all from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

He is the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Sciences, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He is the Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) in the Center for Perceptual Systems. During the Spring of 1992, he held a visiting position in the Division of Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is well known as the inventor or co-inventor of Order Statistic Filters; the Gabor Texture Model; the Image Modulation Model; the Structural Similarity (SSIM) and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) Indices for image quality assessment, the LIVE Image Quality Database, and SIVA - the Signal, Image and Video Audiovisual Demonstration Gallery (used by more than 300 sites around the world), as well as many other contributions to the fields of image and video processing, computational vision, digital microscopy, and modeling of biological visual perception. He has published over 450 technical articles in these areas and holds two U.S. patents. He is also the author of The Handbook of Image and Video Processing, Second Edition (Elsevier Academic Press, 2005) and of Modern Image Quality Assessment (Morgan & Claypool, 2006).

Dr. Bovik received the Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2005, the Distinguished Lecturer Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2000, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award in 1998, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000, and is a two-time Honorable Mention winner of the international Pattern Recognition Society Award for Outstanding Contribution (1988 and 1993). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and has been involved in numerous professional society activities, including: Board of Governors, IEEE Signal Processing Society, 1996-1998; Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 1996-2002; Editorial Board, The Proceedings of the IEEE, 1998-2004; Senior Editorial Board, IEEE Journal on Special Topics in Signal Processing, 2005-present; Associate Editor, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 1993-1995; Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 1989-1993; Editorial Board, Pattern Recognition, 1988-present; Series Editor for Image, Video, and Multimedia Processing, Morgan and Claypool Publishing Company, 2003-present; and Founding General Chairman, First IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, held in Austin, Texas, in November, 1994.

Dr. Bovik is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Texas and is a frequent consultant to legal, industrial and academic institutions.