2014 IEEE-CS Technical Achievement Award

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 3 March 2014 — Five prominent technologists working in areas ranging from computer security and parallel processing to pattern recognition and information retrieval have been named as recipients of IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Awards.

The awardees are:

• Kevin Bowyer, the Schubmehl-Prein Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, for "pioneering contributions to the science and engineering of biometrics;"
• W. Bruce Croft, a Distinguished Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for "outstanding contributions to information retrieval and the development of search engines;"
• Srinivas Devadas, the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for "pioneering work in secure hardware, including the invention of Physical Unclonable Functions and single-chip secure processor architectures;"
• Pedro Felzenszwalb, associate professor of engineering and computer science at Brown University for "the deformable parts model method of detecting objects in images and video;" and
• Albert Zomaya, the Chair Professor of High Performance Computing and Networking and Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney, "for outstanding contributions to the solution of scheduling problems in parallel and distributed computing systems."

Bowyer's research interests touch on computer vision and pattern recognition, including biometrics and data mining. Bowyer is General Chair of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Automated Face and Gesture Recognition and on the editorial board of open-access megajournal IEEE Access. He served as editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the IEEE Biometrics Compendium. He was a founding General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Biometrics Theory, Applications and Systems in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and Program Chair of the International Joint Conference on Biometrics.

Croft is founder of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). His research interests are in information retrieval, including retrieval models, representation, Web search, query processing, and search architectures. He has published more than 250 articles on these and other subjects, was editor in chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and is the editor for the Springer Information Retrieval Series.

Devadas has taught at MIT since 1988. His research interests span Computer-Aided Design (CAD), computer security, and computer architecture. He received the 1990 IEEE Transactions on CAD best paper award for work on synthesis for testability and the 1996 IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems best paper award for work on power estimation. He received the 50th Design Automation Conference (DAC 2013) Top 10 Cited Author Award and the DAC Best-Paper Hat-Trick Award. Devadas and his students in 2002 invented silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), which provided the basis of the founding of Verayo, a company focused on improving the security of computer hardware.

Felzenszwalb's research interests include computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and discrete algorithms.  He is a recipient of a US National Science Foundation Early Career Award.  He served as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and as program chair of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. He is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Vision.

Zomaya is editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Computers and Springer's Scalable Computing Journal and associate editor for another 20 journals. He is also the author or coauthor of seven books and more than 450 technical journal and conference articles, and the editor of 16 books and 23 conference volumes. He is founding editor of the Wiley Book Series on Parallel and Distributed Computing and coeditor of the Wiley Book Series on Bioinformatics and the Wiley Book Series on Nature Inspired Computing. He is editor in chief of the Parallel and Distributed Computing Handbook. Zomaya's research interests are in the areas of algorithms, complex systems, parallel and distributed systems, green computing, and data centers.

To be nominated for a Technical Achievement Award, the contributions must have been made in the past 10-15 years, and have significantly promoted technical progress in the field. The award consists of a certificate and $2,000 honorarium. View more information on the Technical Achievement Award.