Govindaraju Named Outstanding Young Investigator

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Venu Govindaraju, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University at Buffalo and associate director of CEDAR, the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition at UB, has received the "Outstanding Young Investigator Award" from the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, the largest international conference in the pattern-recognition field.

The award, given to an investigator under the age of 40, recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of document analysis and recognition.

Nominations require supporting letters from at least five active researchers from at least three different countries.

At CEDAR, Govindaraju manages several research projects designed to improve handwriting recognition and U.S. address interpretation for the U.S. Postal Service. He also is involved in conducting research on digital libraries and artificial intelligence as well as on using pattern-recognition research in face recognition and biometric applications. The author of more than 100 scientific papers, Govindaraju has patented a unique system for recognizing handwritten words in cursive script.

Along with colleagues at CEDAR, he helped develop the handwriting recognition program that the U.S. Postal Service reports has played a key role in saving the agency about $200 million a year.

Govindaraju, who earned his doctorate at UB, is associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics and others.

He is a resident of Williamsville.