Rice University Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan Receives Engineering Award for his Revolutionary Imaging Technology
- The Indian American’s research seeks to provide solutions for imaging scenarios where the visualization target is inaccessible to current imaging technologies due to the scattering of light in participating media.
Indian American engineer Ashok Veeraraghavan has received the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering for his revolutionary imaging technology that seeks to make the invisible visible. The annual award is given by the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science & Technology (TAMEST) “to star researchers in the state who are engaged in pathbreaking work in medicine, engineering, biological sciences, physical sciences and technology innovation,” according to a Rice news release.
Veeraraghavan is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University. His research “seeks to provide solutions for imaging scenarios where the visualization target is inaccessible to current imaging technologies due to the scattering of light in participating media,” Rice said. Along with his team at Rice, he is working on “creating imaging systems that use novel multi-dimensional image sensors along with machine learning algorithms to undo the effects of light-scattering and see-through scattering media.”
His computational imaging lab researches imaging processes holistically, from optics and sensor design to machine learning processing algorithms, to tackle imaging challenges that are otherwise beyond the reach of current technologies. “Most imaging systems today are designed in a way that does not take all these three things into account together ⎯ they are designed separately,” the news release quoted Veeraraghavan as saying. “Co-design opens up new degrees of freedom and allows us to achieve some imaging functionalities or performance capabilities that are otherwise not possible.”
Co-founded in 2004 by Richard Smalley, TAMEST is a 330-member organization composed of Texas-based Nobel laureates and members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society.
Top photo: Rice University professor Ashok Veeraraghavan, recipient of the 2024 O’Donnell Award in Engineering Recipient, presents his revolutionary imaging technology that seeks to make the invisible visible, at the awards ceremony on Feb. 6. (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology Facebook photo).