A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India, has been made the vice president of research and economic development at one of the country’s leading higher education institutions.
Venu Govindaraju, a leading computer scientist was appointed to the post Jan. 11, by President of UB Satish Tripathi, effective immediately.
“An internationally renowned expert in machine learning, pattern recognition and biometrics who has made transformative contributions to his field at a global level, Dr. Govindaraju has brought tremendous expertise to this position, as well as a deep and broad-based understanding of our university’s unique strengths, opportunities and challenges as we advance our interdisciplinary research enterprise in the 21st century,” Tripathi is quoted saying in the press release.
As acting vice president, Govindaraju is credited with launching several interdisciplinary initiatives including Communities of Excellence and the Creative Arts Initiative
A State University of New York Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Govindaraju has been the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on more than $65 million in research funding. His work focuses on the application of machine learning and pattern recognition.
His seminal work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first, field-deployable, real-time system for reading handwritten addresses on mail pieces. The system, developed by Govindaraju and UB colleagues, resulted in annual savings of hundreds of millions of dollars for the U.S. Postal Service. The technology also was transferred to the Royal Mail in the United Kingdom and Australia Post.
Govindaraju also was among the first researchers to explore human-like handwriting for designing CAPTCHAs — the computer test that requires users to type letters of a distorted image in a box to access content — to exploit the differential in handwriting-reading proficiency between humans and machines.
Govindaraju joined UB in the late 1980s as a graduate student and in his 24 years at UB, he has become one of the world’s leading authorities on machine learning and pattern recognition and also served in various administrative and research capacities.
As director of UB’s Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors, Govindaraju has made significant contributions in the area of biometrics, including new techniques to address a variety of problems in the recognition of fingerprints, faces, facial expressions and multi-biometric fusion. He was instrumental in UB’s designation as a National Science Foundation Center for Identification Technology Research.
A recipient of numerous awards, Govindaraju belongs to a select group of computer scientists who have been named fellows of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and most recently of the National Academy of Inventors. He has co-authored about 400 scientific papers and supervised the dissertations of 30 doctoral students.
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