SIPI - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Alexander A. Sawchuk was born in Washington, DC. He received the S.B. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He joined the University of Southern California in 1971, and is now Leonard Silverman Chair Professor Emeritus in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 2005-2012 he was Systems Chair of the department. He has served in the past as Director of the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) for more than ten years, and as Deputy Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC).
His research has involved the use of optoelectronic devices and systems for parallel optical computing, interconnection, network and data storage applications. Other interests include: image processing, immersive media technology, stereo and panoramic video and displays, wireless health, computer vision, and machine learning. He is the holder of two U.S. Patents and is the author or co-author of more than 175 technical publications and 100 talks in these fields, including several books and book chapters. He has taught courses in these and related fields and has supervised the Ph.D. research of more than 40 students.
He is a Fellow of Optica (formerly the Optical Society (OSA)) and the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE). He is Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He received the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Optica Distinguished Service Award, the USC Mellon Academic Mentoring Support Program Certificate of Recognition, and the USC Faculty Mentoring Faculty Award. He also received the Halliburton Award for Exceptional Service, the Lockheed Senior Research Award, and the Outstanding Teaching Award from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
He has served in many professional positions for scientific and technical communities. He is past Chair of the Board of Directors of the Optica Foundation. In the past he has served as Chair of the Optica Planning Committee, Chair of the Technical Council, and Board of Directors Member and Board Executive Committee Member. He was General Chair of Topical Meetings on Optical Computing, was Associate Editor for Optics Letters, and was Editor of the Information Processing Division of the Optica journal Applied Optics.
He has been a member of the IEEE Photonics Society Electronic Services Committee and was Area Editor for Optical Computing of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. He has been a Member, Delegate, and Chair, United States Advisory Committee for the International Commission for Optics (USAC-ICO), and is past Treasurer of the International Commission for Optics (ICO). He has served often on organizing and technical program committees for the OSA Frontiers in Optics Meeting, Topical Meetings on Optical Computing, Machine Vision, and Smart Pixels, and for many SPIE and IEEE Photonics Society meetings.
He has served as consultant or advisor to several technical companies, including the Aerospace Corporation, Hughes (now Raytheon), TRW (now Northrop-Grumman), Litton, Phaethon Communications and EdgeWave Corporation. He is a founder of Optivision, Inc. and ONI Systems (now part of Ciena Corporation).
Job Titles:
- Dean 's Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Antonio Ortega received the Telecommunications Engineering degree from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain in 1989 and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York, NY in 1994. At Columbia he was supported by a Fulbright scholarship.
In 1994 he joined the Electrical Engineering department at the University of Southern California (USC), where he is currently a Professor. He has served as Associate Chair of EE-Systems and director of the Signal and Image Processing Institute at USC. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of ACM and APSIPA. He has been Chair of the Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP) technical committee, a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), and chair of the SPS Big Data Special Interest Group. He has been technical program co-chair of MMSP 1998, ICME 2002, ICIP 2008 and PCS 2013. He has been Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (IEEE TIP) and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, among others. He is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, an Associate Editor of IEEE T-SIPN and Senior Area Editor of IEEE TIP.
He received the NSF CAREER award, the 1997 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award, the IEEE Signal Processing Society 1999 Magazine Award, the 2006 EURASIP Journal of Advances in Signal Processing Best Paper Award, the ICIP 2011 best paper award, and a best paper award at Globecom 2012. He was a plenary speaker at ICIP 2013 and APSIPA ASC 2015.
His research interests are in the areas of signal compression, representation, communication and analysis. His recent work is focusing on distributed compression, multiview coding, error tolerant compression, information representation in wireless sensor networks and graph signal processing. Almost 40 PhD students have completed their PhD thesis under his supervision at USC and his work has led to over 300 publications in international conferences and journals, as well as several patents.
His work at USC has been or is being funded by agencies such as NSF, NASA, DOE, and companies such as HP, Samsung, LGE, Google, Chevron or Texas Instruments.
Job Titles:
- Trust Endowment for USC Leonard Silverman Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Radiology
Education
Doctoral Degree, Electrical Engineering, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
Bachelor's Degree, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
Job Titles:
- Director of Media Communications Laboratory
- Fellow of AAAS
Dr. Kuo is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE and SPIE. He was Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2012-2014) and the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (1997-2011). He was on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2003-2004), IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing (2001-2003), IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (1995-98) and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (1995-1997). He was an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer (2006-2007). He is currently a Senior Editorial Board Member for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics on Signal Processing (2015-2017). He was an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2006. He was President of Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) in 2013-2014.
Job Titles:
- Hsieh Institute - Project Specialist
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Job Titles:
- Research Associate
- Professor
- Research Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering / Education
Dr. Anand A. Joshi is a research associate professor in ECE. He received his B.E. degree in Electronics from Shivaji University and MTech in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He also worked for Siemens and later for Sasken. Dr. Joshi received his MA in Mathematics and Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from USC in 2008 followed by postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of NeuroImaging at UCLA. Dr. Joshi's research interests lie in the area of brain imaging, geometric methods, deep learning and machine learning.
Job Titles:
- Professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer
- Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering / Education
Justin Haldar is a Professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), where he co-directs the Biomedical Imaging Group and currently serves as the Director of the longstanding Signal and Image Processing Institute. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and is affiliated with the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center, the Brain and Creativity Institute, and the Dynamic Imaging Science Center. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering in 2004 and 2005, respectively, and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in 2011, all from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His research interests include computational imaging, inverse problems, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), constrained image reconstruction, parameter estimation, and experiment design.
His work has been recognized with honors such as the NSF CAREER Award, the IEEE ISBI best paper award, and the IEEE EMBC first-place student paper award, among others. He is the current Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Committee on Computational Imaging. He is also Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, and a Deputy Editor for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
Job Titles:
- Director of Administration
- Finance
Job Titles:
- Chairman in Engineering at the University of Southern California
- Engineering and University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Pediatrics, and Otolaryngology
Education
1990, Master's Degree, Electrical Engineering, University of California - Los Angeles
1988, Bachelor's Degree, Electrical Engineering, Anna University
Doctoral Degree, Electrical Engineering, University of California - Los Angeles
Biography
Prior to USC, from 1995-2000, he was with AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park and AT&T Bell Labaratories, Murray Hill--first as a Senior Member and later as a Principal Member of its Technical Staff. Shri Narayanan received his M.S., Engineer, and Ph.D., all in electrical engineering, from UCLA in 1990, 1992, and 1995, respectively, and his bachelor of engineering in electrical engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy (Chennai, India) in 1988.
Job Titles:
- Faculty Affairs Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Department Chair
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
On the 10th anniversary of his naming gift to the USC Viterbi Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ming Hsieh spoke about the department, cancer research and his desire to give back.
The Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is located on the University Park Campus just south of Downtown Los Angeles. Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Building (EEB) 3740 McClintock Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90089-2560 Powell Hall of Engineering (PHE) 3737 Watt Way Los Angeles, CA 90089-0271
Job Titles:
- Instructional Laboratory Manager
Job Titles:
- Computing Systems and Infrastructure Engineer - Research IT Services
Job Titles:
- Research Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering / Education
Dr. Mitra received the B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in Physics from the Utkal University, India in 1953, M.Sc. (Tech.) degree in Radio Physics & Electronics from the University of Calcutta, India in 1958, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, California in 1960 and 1962, respectively. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems as the Stephen and Etta Varra Professor in July 2006. He has published over 640 papers in the areas of analog and digital signal processing, and image processing. He has also authored and co-authored twelve books, and holds five patents.
Dr. Mitra has served IEEE in various capacities including service as the President of the IEEE Circuits & Systems Society in 1986, and has held visiting appointments in Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Dr. Mitra is the recipient of the 1973 F.E. Terman Award and the 1985 AT&T Foundation Award of the American Society of Engineering Education, the 1989 Education Award, the 2000 Mac Van Valkenburg Society Award and the Golden Jubilee Medal of the IEEE Circuits & Systems Society, the Distinguished Senior U.S. Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany in 1989, the 1996 Technical Achievement Award, the 2001 Society Award and the 2006 Education Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the IEEE Millennium Medal in 2000, the McGraw-Hill/Jacob Millman Award of the IEEE Education Society in 2001, the 2002 Technical Achievement Award of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), the 2005 SPIE Technology Achievement Award of the International Society for Optical Engineers, the University Medal of the Slovak Technical University, Bratislava, Slovakia in 2005, and the 2006 James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal of the IEEE. He is the co-recipient of the 2000 Blumlein-Browne-Willans Premium of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (London) and the 2001 IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award. He has received Honorary Doctorate degrees from the Tampere University of Technology, Finland, the Technical University of Bucharest, Romania, and the Technical University of Iasi, Romania. He is an Honorary Professor of the Northern Jiaotong University, Beijing, China and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He was appointed an Honorary Citizen of Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 2007. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences, an Academician of the Academy of Finland, a foreign member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, a foreign member of the Academy of Engineering, Mexico, a foreign fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and a foreign fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India. Dr. Mitra is a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, and SPIE, and a member of EURASIP
Job Titles:
- Senior Computer Consultant Specialist
Job Titles:
- Engineer
- Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors
- Research Summary
- University Professor
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is University Professor and holder of the Niki and Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) and serves as the inaugural Vice President for Presidential Initiatives on the Senior Leadership Team of USC's President. He is a Professor in the Signal and Image Processing Institute of USC's Ming Hsieh Electrical & Computer Engineering department with joint appointments as Professor in Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Pediatrics and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. He is also the inaugural director of the Ming Hsieh Institute, a Research Director for the Information Sciences Institute at USC and a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. He held the inaugural Viterbi Professorship in Engineering at USC (2007-2016). He was also a Research Area Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center, an NSF Engineering Research Center at USC, and was the Research Principal for the USC Pratt and Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering, a unique partnership between academia and industry (2003-2007).
Shri Narayanan is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC). Shri Narayanan is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. He is also a member of the professional honor societies Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi and Eta Kappa Nu.
Shri Narayanan has received several honors and awards including the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award (IEEE Technical Field Award), 2024 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society, the 2023 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, 2023 IEEE SPS Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award (for contributions to spoken language processing technologies and their societal applications) from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the 2020 ACM ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award. His research publications have received the 2023 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History (for paper published in Digital Humanities Quarterly with Gabor Toth, Tim Hempel, Krishna Somandepalli), a 2018 ISCA Best Journal Paper Award (for paper published in Computer Speech and Language Journal with Ming Li and Kyu Han), the Ten Year Technical Impact Award from ACM ICMI in 2014, a 2009 Best Transactions (Journal) Paper award (with Chul Min Lee) and a 2005 Best Transactions Paper Award (with Alexandros Potamianos) from the IEEE Signal Processing society for papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing.
Papers co-authored with his students have won recognition at MediaEval 2020 (Emotions and Themes in Music), ACM-AVEC 2018 Emotion Gold-standard Subchallenge, 2018 Behavioral, Economic, and Socio-Cultural Computing Conference (Distinguished Research on Digital Humanities) Interspeech 2016, ICASSP 2016, Interspeech2015-Nativeness Challenge, Interspeech2014-Cognitive Load Challenge, Interspeech2013-Paralinguistics Challenge, Interspeech 2013, Interspeech2012-Speaker Trait Challenge, Interspeech2011-Speaker State Challenge, InterSpeech 2010, InterSpeech 2009-Emotion Challenge, IEEE DCOSS 2009, IEEE MMSP 2007, IEEE MMSP 2006, ICASSP 2005 and ICSLP 2002.
Shri Narayanan received the Engineer's Council 2015 Distinguished Engineering Educator Award, and was selected as IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-2011, the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Distinguished Lecturer for 2015-16, and the 2017 Willard R. Zemlin Memorial Lecturer for American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA). Shri Narayanan has also received an NSF CAREER award, a Okawa Research Award, IBM Faculty Awards (2008, 2010), Google Faculty Research Award (2016), Amazon Research Award (2020), the 2011 UCLA Engineering Alumni Professional Achievement Award, a 2019 Distinguished Alumnus Award from College of Engineering - Guindy (India). Shri Narayanan has also been recognized at USC for his research, service and mentoring including with a USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship, a faculty fellowship for Interdisciplinary research, USC Viterbi Engineering Junior and Senior Research Awards and Use-inspired research award, USC Electrical Engineering Northrop-Grumman Research award, a Mellon award for mentoring excellence, and a USC Distinguished Faculty Service Award from the Academic Senate.
Shri Narayanan served as the inaugural VP for Education for the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2020-22). He is an Editor for the Computer, Speech and Language Journal and a Senior Editorial Board member for the APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, having previously served as Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (2016-2018) and as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Speech and Audio Processing (2000-2004), the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2005-2008), the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2008-2012), IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks (2014-2015), the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2010-2016), the Journal of Acoustical Society of America (2009-2016) and the APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing (2011-2020). He holds or has held positions on the Speech Communication and Acoustic Standards committees of the Acoustical Society of America and the Advisory Council of the International Speech Communication Association, the BigData SIG (2014-2017) the Speech Processing Technical Committee (2003-2007) and on the Multimedia Signal Processing technical committee (2005-2008; 2014-2020), Nomination & Appointments Committee (2023-24) of the IEEE Signal Processing Societya He has also served in several leadership roles in organizing conferences and workshops of professional societies such as IEEE, ISCA, and ACM. At USC, he was Chair of the Joint Provost-Senate University Research Committee (2006-09) and, a Past President of the Phi Kappa Phi Academic Honor Society (2007-08).
Job Titles:
- Public Communications Specialist