The Cockrell School of Engineering awarded Dr. Alan Bovik, the Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award for the academic year 2014 – 2015 for his outstanding achievements in the field of image and video quality engineering.
The Cockrell School of Engineering established this award in 1977 to recognize a faculty member who has made significant contributions in furthering the profession of engineering.
Speaking on the occasion, Prof. Bovik said, “It’s a great honor to receive the Joe J King Award. It recognizes that crossing the boundaries between science and engineering bears great fruit”.
Dr. Bovik is the Ernest J. Cockrell Endowed Chair in Engineering at UT. He is also a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Institute for Neurosciences. In addition to this he is the Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) at UT. At LIVE, he primarily works on being able to measure the quality of an image or video, and to gauge the distortion that has been added to it during different stages of capturing this image. Dr. Bovik along with his students is working on advancing the field of image and video quality assessment by developing quantitative measures that can automatically predict perceived image quality. This is popularly known as objective quality assessment (QA) research, which aims to design algorithms whose quality prediction is in good agreement with human judgment.
Prof. Bovik also acknowledges the efforts put in by his students towards collaborative research initiatives. He said, “Many brilliant students contributed to this work. They exemplified the cross-disciplinary ethic by learning deep principles of both visual neuroscience and video engineering, fusing them to create industry-standard video quality systems, along the way expending tremendous effort conducting world-standard human studies of video quality perception. The increased visibility of our work which this award gives will help facilitate our even more ambitious future plans.”
Last year, Dr. Bovik was included in the Thomson Reuters list of Highly Cited Researchers for 2014. This list recognizes many of the world’s leading scientific minds and their growing influence on the global research landscape. He has also authored The Handbook of Image and Video Processing, Second Edition (Elsevier Academic Press, 2005) and Modern Image Quality Assessment (Morgan & Claypool, 2006) among many others.