Scott T. Acton, Ph.D.

Biography:

Scott T. Acton (F) is the Lawrence R. Quarles Professor and Chair of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA). He is also appointed in Biomedical Engineering. Between 2019-2022, he was Program Director and acting Deputy Division Director in the Computer andInformation Sciences and Engineering directorateof the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).  Prof. Acton received the M.S. (1990) andPh.D. (1993) degrees at the University of Texas at Austin, and he received his B.S. degree at Virginia Tech (1988).

Prof. Acton is a Fellow of the IEEE (2013); Fellow, Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (2024); and Fellow, Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (2024). At NSF, he was given the Director’s Award for Superior Accomplishment (2020). Prof. Acton was the IEEE/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer (1996). At UVA, he has received the All University Teaching Award (2009) and the Educational InnovationAward (2017).

Prof. Acton’s laboratory at UVA is called VIVA - Virginia Image and Video Analysis that specializes in biological/biomedical image analysis problems. He is also co-lead of the NSF-sponsored project called Artificial Intelligence for Advancing Instruction (AIAI), which is joint work with UVA Education and Human Development.

Prof. Acton was Co-Chair, IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (2018); General Chair (2006) and Technical Chair (2004), Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computer; served on the Board of Asilomar (2008-2023); and Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2014-2018). 

Prof. Acton’s technical interests include multimodal transformers, diffusion networks, graph theory, and diffusion processes for image and video analysis.

Scott Acton
Lawrence R. Quarles Professor of Engineering and Applied Science

University of Virginia, USA