Indian-American computer engineer honoured with Texas' highest academic award

Texas, February 26

Indian-origin trailblazing computer engineer and professor Ashok Veeraraghavan has been awarded the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in engineering, one of the highest academic honours in Texas.

The Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology (TAMEST), which presents this award to rising researchers in the state, said Veeraraghavan, professor of electrical and computer engineering at George R Brown School of Engineering at Rice University, was chosen for his revolutionary imaging technology that seeks to make the invisible visible.

The award is given annually to star researchers in the state engaged in path-breaking work in medicine, engineering, biological sciences, physical sciences and technology innovation.

This year’s engineering award went to Veeraraghavan, recognising his group’s “revolutionary imaging technology that seeks to make the invisible visible”, according to a statement from TAMEST.

Originally from Chennai, where he spent most of his pre-adult life, Veeraraghavan told PTI, “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 last decade.”

Veeraraghavan’s computational imaging lab conducts research on imaging processes holistically, from optics and sensor design to machine learning processing algorithms, to tackle imaging challenges that are otherwise beyond the reach of current technologies.

“Most imaging systems today are designed in a way that does not take all these three things into account together; they are designed separately,” Veeraraghavan said.

“Co-design opens up new degrees of freedom and allows us to achieve some imaging functionalities or performance capabilities that are otherwise not possible,” he added.

Veeraraghavan’s research seeks to provide solutions for imaging scenarios where the visualisation target is inaccessible to current imaging technologies due to the scattering of light in participating media.

“There are many examples of this,” he said.

“One familiar example is when you’re driving a car and it’s foggy, so you can’t see too far out. In this case, fog acts as the scattering medium. If you’re doing satellite imaging, clouds can act as the scattering medium. And if you’re doing biological imaging, it’s skin that acts as the obscurant so you can’t see blood cells or the structure of the vascular system, for example,” he explained.