IEEE Honors Professor Chang for his Pioneering Achievements in Multimedia
Shih-Fu Chang, Richard Dicker Professor of Telecommunications and Professor of Computer Science, has won the Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for pioneering contributions to signal processing for multimedia content analysis and retrieval.
The award honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to theory and/or practice in areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact on the field.
“I am honored to receive this prestigious recognition and to join a set of distinguished scholars who have made extraordinary contributions to the field,” said Chang. “I’d like to dedicate the award to the group of amazing students and collaborators whom I have been privileged to work with.”
Chang directs the Digital Video and Multimedia Lab at Columbia. He has made significant contributions to multimedia search, signal processing, computer vision, and machine learning. He has received numerous awards for his work, including an ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, Navy ONR Young Investigator Award, IBM Faculty Award, and an NSF CAREER Award. He is a fellow of IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Chang is currently working on developing accurate and intuitive search techniques that can find information or discover patterns from a gigantic set of images or videos such as those found on the Web, mobile applications, broadcast media, as well as emerging biomedical databases. His group recently won the Best Paper Award at ACM Multimedia 2011 for their invention using visual matching in mobile location recognition. In addition, his group achieved the top performance on two occasions at the international evaluation forum TRECVID (Text Retrieval Conference Video Retrieval Evaluation), organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology: first in 2008 for semantic visual concept detection and again in 2010 for multimedia event detection.
Chang, who also is Senior Vice Dean of the School, is a Committee Member for the Center for New Media and an Affiliated Member in the Center for Foundations of Data Science, both part of the new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. In the Fall 2012 issue of Columbia Engineering Magazine, Chang wrote the article "Picture This," about how the explosion of digital video is fueling not only a wealth of opportunity but also a whole set of new and challenging problems.
Shih-Fu Chang