25th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture Series - Prof. Rama Chellappa
20 Mar 2014
Prof. Rama Chellappa from the University of Maryland, College Park visited the Department and delivered a Distinguished Lecture on “The Evolution of Probabilistic Models and Uncertainty Analysis in Computer Vision Research” on 20 March 2014. Prof. Chellappa illustrated the ideas of simulated annealing, robust methods and error bounds, many computer vision problems, which were developed since the introduction of Markov random fields. Prof. Chellappa highlighted the role played by probabilistic models and statistical inference for image segmentation, appearance, shape and behavior-encoded tracking, error bounds for the structure from motion problem and some recent works on probabilistic inference on manifolds for spatio-temporal alignment, activity recognition and domain adaptation. The lecture was full of constructive interaction and well received. After the lecture, Prof. Chellappa also shared his research insights with the research postgraduate students.
Prof. Rama Chellappa received the B.E. (Hons.) degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Madras, India in 1975 and the M.E. (with Distinction) degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1977. He received the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1978 and 1981 respectively. During 1981-1991, he was a faculty member in the department of EE-Systems at University of Southern California (USC). Since 1991, he has been a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and an affiliate Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland (UMD), College Park. He is also affiliated with the Center for Automation Research, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (Permanent Member) and is serving as the Chair of the ECE department. In 2005, he was named a Minta Martin Professor of Engineering. His current research interests are face recognition, clustering and video summarization, 3D modeling from video, image and video-based recognition of objects, events and activities, dictionary-based inference, compressive sensing, domain adaptation and hyper spectral processing.
Prof. Chellappa received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, four IBM Faculty Development Awards, an Excellence in Teaching Award from the School of Engineering at USC, and two paper awards from the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). He is a recipient of the K.S. Fu Prize from IAPR. He received the Society, Technical Achievement and Meritorious Service Awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He also received the Technical Achievement and Meritorious Service Awards from the IEEE Computer Society. At UMD, he was elected as a Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow, as a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, received an Outstanding Innovator Award from the Office of Technology Commercialization, and an Outstanding GEMSTONE Mentor Award from the Honors College. He received the Outstanding Faculty Research Award and the Poole and Kent Teaching Award for Senior Faculty from the College of Engineering. In 2010, he was recognized as an Outstanding ECE by Purdue University. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, OSA and AAAS. He holds four patents.
Prof. Chellappa served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He has served as a General and Technical Program Chair for several IEEE international and national conferences and workshops. He is a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society and served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Recently, he completed a two-year term as the President of the IEEE Biometrics Council.
