USA (Commonwealth Union)_ Ashok Veeraraghavan, a computer engineer and professor of Indian descent, has been honoured with the prestigious Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award, the highest academic accolade in Texas. Presented by the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science, and Technology (TAMEST), the award recognizes Veeraraghavan’s groundbreaking imaging technology, which aims to make the imperceptible visible.
Expressing delight over receiving the prestigious award, Dr. Veeraraghavan attributed the success to the innovative research conducted by numerous students, postdocs, and research scientists in the computational imaging lab at Rice University over the past decade. He stated, “I am delighted to receive this award. It is the recognition of the wonderful and innovative research that many students, postdocs, and research scientists in the computational imaging lab at Rice University have done over the past decade”. He added, “Most imaging systems at present are designed in a way that does not consider all these three things together. They are designed separately. Co-design opens up new degrees of freedom and allows us to achieve some imaging functionalities or performance capabilities that are otherwise not possible”.
The Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award is an annual recognition bestowed upon exceptional researchers making significant contributions across various fields, including medicine, engineering, biological sciences, physical sciences, and technological sciences. Dr. Ashok Veeraraghavan is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. Hailing from Chennai, India, he graduated with a BTech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2002, followed by a master’s degree in 2004 and a doctoral degree in 2008 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Veeraraghavan’s work focuses on developing solutions for imaging systems where the target visualization is hindered by the scattering effect of light in participating media. He illustrated this concept with examples such as driving in foggy conditions or satellite imaging through clouds, where the scattering medium disrupts visibility. He explained, “One familiar example is when you are driving a car and it is foggy, so you can’t see too far out. In this situation, fog acts as the scattering medium. If you are doing satellite imaging, clouds can act as the scattering medium.”
Since joining Rice University in 2010, Dr. Veeraraghavan has been promoted to Associate Professor in 2017 and Professor in 2020. His research spans computational imaging, comprehensive sensing for imaging, signal processing and computer vision, data science, and neuro-engineering systems. Further, Dr. Veeraraghavan has previously co-developed the FlatCam, a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces lenses in traditional cameras. This innovation has made sophisticated computer algorithms more practical, facilitating the sensor’s ability to detect and convert measurements into images and videos.
