Inducted in 2025 for advancing global safety and security through transformative advancements in AI, including face recognition and gait analysis.
Rama Chellappa is a UMD College Park Professor who served as chair of the Clark School’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2011 to 2018. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Whiting School of Engineering) and Biomedical Engineering (School of Medicine) with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.
Chellappa’s research interests and applications include artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine intelligence, and signal and image processing, with applications in biometrics, self-driving cars, forensics, and 2D and 3D modeling of faces, objects, and terrain. His research has greatly advanced the field of automatic face recognition by introducing the use of local and global facial features, and designing the first Bayesian methods for video face recognition. He has led large scale studies in conjunction with government agencies that have resulted in facial recognition systems that are now used by the Departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security.
Chellappa has also worked on gait analysis, which can apply to a range of uses from diagnosing Parkinson's disease to human identification at a distance. He also developed methods for whole-body and iris-based recognition of humans. He holds nine patents and is a recipient of numerous awards that recognize his contributions in research, teaching, innovation, and mentoring. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, AIMBE, IAPR, IEEE, NAI, OSA, and the Washington Academy of Sciences.