Bovik Receives Award from Alma Mater

Dr. Al Bovik has been chosen for the 2008 ECE Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Recent winners include Prith Banerjee (2007), Kent Fuchs (2005), Jerry Sanders (2001), and Jack Kilby (2000). UI-CU’s citation to Bovik reads: "For fundamental and enduring technical, educational and service contributions to the field of digital image and video processing." The award will be presented at a banquet at the University of Illinois in September of 2008. Another WNCG faculty member, Ted Rappaport, is the recipient of a similar alumni award from Purdue.

Dr. Bovik was also elected Fellow of the Society of Photo-Optical and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) "for pioneering technical,leadership, and educational contributions to the field of image processing."

In addition, Bovik gave two Plenary Address recently: at the IEEE Signal Processing Society International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, Chania, Crete, Greece, October 2007, and at the Southwest Symposium on Image Analysis and Interpretation, Santa Fe, New Mexico, March 2008.

Recent visitors of Dr. Bovik’s include:

• Dr. Boa-Jen (Andy) Pong, from the government standards agency ITRI in Taiwan, is visiting LIVE to study image quality assessment.
• Changhoon Yim, a Visiting Professor from Konkuk University, Seoul, Korea, is visiting LIVE to study problems in image analysis.

Three of Bovik’s students graduated with their PhD degrees in December 2007:

• Raghu Raj, "Optimal Visual Search Strategies Using Natural Scene Statistics," Raj took a Research Engineer position at The Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC.
• Abtine Tavassoli, "Discovery and Representation of Human Strategies for Visual Search," Tavasolli took at position as Post-Doctoral Researcher at UCLA.
• Sumohana Channappayya, (Co-supervised with Robert Heath): "Image Communication System Design Based on the Structural Similarity Index," Channappayya is now a Research Engineer at Packet Video, Inc, San Diego, CA.