2020 IEEE Medal & Recognition Recipients Honored Online

Ramalingam Chellappa Receives IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal

IEEE Life Fellow Ramalingam Chellappa has received this year’s IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal “for contributions to image and video processing, especially applications to face recognition.” A pioneer in developing image, video, and multidimensional signal processing theory and methods for solving image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition problems, Chellappa has profoundly affected the development of systems for face recognition and verification, image and video synthesis and analytics, real-time action detection, and active authentication. He developed groundbreaking parameter estimation and neighborhood selection rules for Markov random field (MRF) models and developed algorithms for image restoration, texture analysis, and segmentation using MRFs. His linear discriminant analysis-based algorithm pioneered discriminative methods for training face recognition systems.

Chellappa is a Distinguished University Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.

The IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal was established in 1995 and is sponsored by Texas Instruments, Inc.

This year, in light of the global health emergency and pervasive travel restrictions, IEEE made the difficult decision not to hold the in-person IEEE Honors Ceremony. Instead, Chellappa and the other 22 diverse 2020 IEEE Medal and Recognition recipients will be honored in a series of online promotions.

• Visit the Awards’ Facebook and Twitter social media platforms to see a continuing series of posts highlighting each 2020 recipient.
   
• A great series of videos featuring all of 2020 Medal and Recognition recipients has been created on the Awards Channel on IEEE.TV. Each video offers a unique look at this year’s award recipients, including their tremendous contributions that have made a lasting impact on technology, society, and the engineering profession.
   
• To learn more about the Medal of Honor and all other awards in IEEE’s Awards Program portfolio, lip through the digital 2020 IEEE Awards Booklet, where you’ll find each recipient’s photo and bio.
   
• The Awards Program is also partnering with the IEEE History Center to promote the 2020 recipients on their Engineering and Technology Wiki. Read Q&As with these recipients to find out what motivates them, what got them started in their careers—as well as lots of other interesting factoids about them, including their favorite foods.

Plans are being made to recognize the 2020 recipients at the 2021 IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit & Honors Ceremony.