Prof Govindaraju of University of Baffalo

Venugopal Govindaraju, Ph.D., Distinguished Speaker (Biometric Council)

PRESENTATION: We present an overview of two decades of innovation in handwriting recognition at the Govindaraju lab at the University at Buffalo and offer a perspective on the evolution of research in this area and the future of the field.  We highlight our seminal work in handwriting recognition that was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the U.S. Postal Service, described as one of the first practical success stories of AI We journey through the HWR landscape, from lexicon-based to lexicon-free approaches, and from heuristics-driven techniques to the principal methodologies that we introduced.  We explore a sample of the variety of impactful applications that resulted from our research, from the processing of healthcare forms for the NYS Department of Health for deriving early indicators of outbreaks, to access to historical documents through word spotting, transcript mapping, and other indexing schemes for digital libraries, to award-winning pre-processing techniques and multilingual OCR solutions for automated machine translation for armed forces in the theater.  We introduce the novel concept of accents in handwriting and our pioneering use of handwritten CAPTCHAs to enhance security.  We end with a look at some of the challenging problems that we are working on in the digital humanities space and new ideas to explore such as the potential use of whiteboard recognition technologies in the flipped classroom setting.

Biography:

Dr. Venugopal Govindaraju, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Buffalo, is the director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) since its inception in 2003, and an Associate Director of the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) since 1995.. He received his Bachelor’s degree with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1986, and his Ph.D. from the University of Buffalo in 1992. His research focus is on machine learning and pattern recognition in the domains of Document Image Analysis and Biometrics.

 His seminal work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the US Postal Service. He was also the prime technical lead responsible for technology transfer to Postal Services in the US, Australia, and the UK. He has been a Principal or Co-Investigator of sponsored projects funded for about 65 million dollars. Dr. Govindaraju has supervised the dissertations of 40 doctoral students and 15 MS theses as major advisors.

He has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and is currently on the editorial boards of 3 IEEE transactions (IEEE-T-PAMI IEEE-T-SMC, IEEE-T-IFS) and IEEE Access and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Biometrics Council Compendium. He has 400 refereed publications that include 78 journal papers, 22 book chapters, and 300 symposium/conference papers in pattern recognition theory and its applications, and edited six books including three handbooks in the areas of Big Data, Machine Learning Theory, and Applications, Cognitive Computing- Theory and Applications, and others on Multi-biometrics for Human Identification, and Biometrics-Sensors, Systems, and Algorithm. He has four patents related to his work on Biometrics.

He has been active in organizing conferences and has served over a dozen conferences/workshops on Biometrics: Theory, Algorithms, and Systems (BTAS) and chaired other events in the Biometrics areas. He has been a regular presenter as a keynoter, and plenary speaker as well as seminars at international events. He has been on the advisory board of the Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, EngageClick Inc., Copanion Inc., and the International Graphonomics Society

Address:Buffalo, New York, United States