ECE Alumni Veeraraghavan, Zheng Elected IEEE Fellows

Ashok Veeraraghavan (EE PhD ‘08) and Yefeng Zheng (EE PhD ‘06) have been named to the 2022 Class of IEEE Fellows. IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.

Ashok Veeraraghavan

Veeraraghavan has been named a fellow for “contributions to computational photography and computer vision.” While at Maryland, Veeraraghavan was advised by College Park Professor Rama Chellappa. Dr. Veeraraghavan is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. He received his Masters and Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Before joining Rice University in 2010, he spent three years as a Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA, and was co-recipient of the MERL President's Award in 2009. He won the Hershel. M. Rich Invention Award in 2016 and 2017, and an NSF CAREER award in 2017. His lab focuses on solving hard and challenging problems in imaging and vision by co-designing sensors, optics, electronics, signal processing, and machine learning algorithms. This emerging area of research is called computational imaging or more generally computational sensing. His group is generally application-agnostic and focuses on developing foundational theories, tools, techniques, and systems.

Veeraraghavan is co-developer of FlatCam, a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces lenses in a traditional camera. Making it practical are the sophisticated computer algorithms that process what the sensor detects and converts the sensor measurements into images and videos. FlatCams may find use in security or disaster-relief applications and as flexible, foldable, wearable cameras, and even disposable cameras. His team has also developed FlatScope, a flat microscope and software system that, unlike traditional lens-based microscopes, simultaneously has a large field of view and high resolution.

Yefeng Zheng

Yefeng Zheng has been named a fellow for “contributions to machine learning for medical imaging.” At Maryland, he was advised by University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) Research Scientist Emeritus Dave Doermann, and was co-advised by Professor Chellappa.

Zheng is Director and Distinguished Scientist of the Tencent Jarvis Lab in Shenzhen, China, leading the company's initiative on Medical AI. His research interests include medical image analysis, natural language processing, document image analysis, computer vision, and deep learning. He has published over 200 papers in top journals and conferences, and has invented more than 70 US patents, including a patent on Marginal Space Learning based heart chamber segmentation, which won the Thomas A. Edison Patent Award of New Jersey R&D Council in 2011. He is a major contributor for several other prestigious awards too, including Siemens Top Innovation Award in 2010 and the Techno-College Innovation Award of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS) in 2010. As a co-developer of an Asian Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system, he won the National Scientific and Technological Progress Award (2nd class) of China in 2003. He is a fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a Program Co-Chair of International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2021, an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging since 2018, and was an Associate Editor of IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics from 2013-2018.

Zheng received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2006 with a dissertation on handwritten document image analysis. After graduation, he joined Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey, first as a Research Scientist and later being promoted to a Project Manager and Principal Key Expert. In 2018, he joined Tencent and is now leading Tencent Jarvis Lab, a lab dedicated to medical artificial intelligence.

Published December 16, 2021