Rama Chellappa was awarded the Edwin H Land Medal by Optica (formerly Optical Society of America) in their 2024 Awards announcement, honoring his seminal work in image/video processing and computer vision. His contributions have led to breakthroughs in various technologies, improving countless lives worldwide and marking him as a pioneer in his field.

The University of Maryland team, led by Tom Goldstein, received a notable grant from the DOE's INCITE program, awarding them 750,000 node-hours on advanced supercomputers. This substantial computational time is a boon for their AI research, specifically aimed at studying and scaling foundation models in AI, including innovative vision and language models. This allocation not only significantly enhances their research capabilities but also democratizes access to state-of-the-art computational resources. It marks a crucial step in advancing AI technology, fostering greater innovation, and broadening the scope of AI research accessibility.

Rama Chellappa received the prestigious Distinguished Researcher Award from the IEEE Computer Society's Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Technical Committee. This accolade recognizes Chellappa’s extensive contributions to the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning, showcasing the profound effect of his research on technologies such as biometrics and smart cars.

Professor Stanley Osher achieved a monumental milestone, surpassing 150,000 citations on Google Scholar, reflecting the vast impact of his work across various disciplines. This achievement not only highlights his contributions to mathematics and computational science but also underscores the global recognition of his research and its influence on generations of scientists and researchers.

Ryan Tibshirani was awarded the 2023 COPSS Presidents’ Award, a testament to his significant contributions to nonparametric estimation, high-dimensional inference, and distribution-free inference. His work has deeply influenced the statistical and machine learning communities, demonstrating the broad applications of his research in both theoretical and practical domains. The COPSS Presidents' Award, which is often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Statistics" is one of the highest honors in the field of statistics.

Tom Goldstein was celebrated with the Outstanding Paper Award at ICML for his innovative work on watermarking large language models (LLMs). His research presents a novel method for embedding signals in generated text, invisible to humans but detectable algorithmically, addressing the challenges in the authenticity and origin of AI-generated content.

Moshe Vardi was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, recognizing his pivotal role in using logic as a foundational framework for modeling computational systems. This honor acknowledges Vardi's lasting impact on fields such as automatic verification and database theory, underscoring his standing as a leading figure in computer science.

Rama Chellappa's election to the National Academy of Engineering highlighted his career-long contributions to digital image analysis and automatic face recognition. This honor places him among the ranks of engineers whose innovations have significantly advanced their fields, underscoring his influence on both academic research and practical applications.

Project PI Richard Baraniuk presented the 2023 AMS Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts in January 2023.  The first AMS Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture was given in 1923. This public lecture is one of the signature events in the Society’s calendar.  Previous speakers have included Albert Einstein, Vannevar Bush, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Kurt Gödel, Hermann Weyl, Eugene Wigner, Donald Knuth, Herb Simon, David Mumford, Ingrid Daubechies, and Claude Shannon.

Congratulations to project PI Richard Baraniuk who has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering in recognition of his contributions to engineering "for the development and broad dissemination of open educational resources and for foundational contributions to compressive sensing." Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. More from Rice News.