Govindaraju named fellow of National Academy of Inventors

Venu Govindaraju, a globally recognized expert in machine learning and pattern recognition, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

The peer-nominated honor is given to academic researchers who have created or facilitated outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.

Govindaraju is among 168 new fellows who bring the total number of NAI fellows to 582, representing more than 190 research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutions. They will be inducted on April 15 at the fifth annual conference of the National Academy of Inventors being held at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Virginia.

Govindaraju, UB’s interim vice president for research and economic development, and a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has designed several algorithms for cursive-handwriting recognition suitable for real-time applications. His work in multilingual recognition systems ranges from the development of Devanagari optical character recognition (OCR) resources under the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries initiative, to innovative recognition strategies for Arabic OCR for the U.S. Department of Defense. He was among the first 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.

He and colleagues at UB also helped create a handwriting-recognition program that was essential to the first, field-deployable, real-time system for reading handwritten addresses on pieces of mail. The system saved the U.S. Postal Service hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

In biometrics, he has developed new techniques to address problems in the recognition of fingerprints, faces, facial expressions and multi-biometric fusion. He is the founding director of UB’s Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) and has spearheaded establishment of a National Science Foundation Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) at UB.

Govindaraju has co-authored about 400 scientific papers, published five edited books and mentored 30 UB PhD students. He is currently advising eight UB doctoral candidates.

Among the honors he has received are the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 2014, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Technical Achievement Award in 2010 and the MIT Global Indus Technovator Award in 2004. He is a fellow of such prestigious societies such as AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition) and the SPIE (International Society of Optics and Photonics).

Govindaraju belongs to a select group of computer scientists who have been named fellows of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE.

He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India. He has received master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from UB.