Rama Chellappa, Dana Nau Elected ACM Fellows

Two longstanding UMIACS members have been elected as 2013 Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

Rama Chellappa, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Dana Nau, professor of computer science, were two of the 50 ACM Fellows selected this year from the world’s leading universities, corporations and research labs.

“We recognize these scientists and engineers, creators and builders, theorists and practitioners who are making a difference in our lives,” says ACM President Vinton G. Cerf. “They’re enabling us to listen, learn, calculate and communicate in ways that underscore the benefits of the digital age.”

Chellappa
 was honored for his contributions to image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition; Nau for his contributions to automated search and planning.

“Rama and Dana are a bedrock for innovation and scientific impact at UMIACS,” says Amitabh Varshney, the institute’s director. “They’re not only leaders in cutting-edge research, but are also invaluable mentors for students, postdocs and junior faculty.”

Chellappa is active in the Center for Automation Research, where he investigates face and gait analysis, markerless motion capture, 3D modeling from video, image and video-based recognition and exploitation and hyper spectral processing.

Nau focuses much of his work on artificial intelligence research, especially in the areas of game theory and AI planning.

ACM will formally recognize the 2013 ACM Fellows at its annual Awards Banquet on June 21, 2014, in San Francisco.