MIT Indian Business Club Chooses UB's Govindaraju to Receive Its "Technovators" Award

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Venu Govindaraju, Ph.D., professor of computer science and engineering at the University at Buffalo, and director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) at UB, is one of 15 Indian scientists and engineers in the U.S. chosen by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Indian Business Club to receive a Global Indus Technovators Award.

The Global Indus Technovators Awards were instituted last year to recognize distinguished innovators of Indian origin.

Govindaraju, one of four recipients being recognized for work in information technology, has patented a unique system for recognizing handwritten words in cursive script.

As director of CUBS, he applies his expertise in human-computer interaction, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence to biometrics such as facial, fingerprint and even chemical composition of skin, as well as the use of digital libraries for applications ranging from homeland security and forensics to health care and the retail sector.

He recently developed an optical character recognition (OCR) system for Hindi, Sanskrit and dozens of Indian and South Asian languages based on the Devanagari script, helping to bridge the digital divide between the developed and developing worlds. Similarly, he now is developing the first OCR software for handwritten and machine-printed Arabic documents.

Govindaraju also is the associate director of UB's Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition. Along with colleagues at CEDAR, he helped develop the handwriting-recognition program that the U.S. Postal Service reports has played a key role in saving the agency about $200 million a year.

A recipient of an "Outstanding Young Investigator Award" from the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, the largest international conference in the pattern-recognition field, Govindaraju is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

He received his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 1986, and his master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University at Buffalo in 1988 and 1992, respectively.

He is a resident of Williamsville.