Rama Chellappa has been appointed chief scientist for the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy (IAA). In this role, he will work to strengthen the IAA’s technical capabilities, expand external research collaboration opportunities, and develop the IAA’s scientific priorities.
Chellappa is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Johns Hopkins’ departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, with a secondary appointment in Computer Science. He is affiliated with the JHU Center for Imaging Science, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Mathematical Institute for Data Science, and the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. He is an expert in computer vision, pattern recognition, machine intelligence, and artificial intelligence.
“Rama brings a profound understanding of AI, a network of stellar colleagues, tremendous enthusiasm, and a willingness to work to make his colleagues successful. His insights have already shaped our thinking in high-impact areas such as shaping our proposed work on trusted AI for healthcare differences,” says James Bellingham, IAA executive director.
Chellappa says that, “given the expected presence of AI in our professional and personal lives, I look forward to working with colleagues at JHU to address issues such as trustworthiness, robustness, privacy, human-AI interactions, and the societal impact of AI-based methodologies, algorithms and systems.”
Before joining JHU in August of 2020, Dr. Chellappa worked at the University of Maryland as a Distinguished University Professor, a Minta Martin Professor of Engineering, and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He continues to hold a non-tenure position as a College Park Professor in ECE at the University of Maryland.
During his accomplished career, Chellappa has received numerous awards for his work, including the K. S. Fu Prize from the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR); the Society, Technical Achievement, and Meritorious Service Awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society; and four IBM Faculty Development Awards. He has also received the Technical Achievement and Meritorious Service awards from the IEEE Computer Society, the Inaugural Leadership Award from the IEEE Biometrics Council, and the 2020 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Medal for Signal Processing.
While at the University of Maryland, he received college and university-level recognitions for research, teaching, innovation, and mentoring of undergraduate students. He has been recognized as an Outstanding ECE by Purdue University and as a Distinguished Alumni by the Indian Institute of Science, India. He served as the editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), as a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and as the president of the IEEE Biometrics Council. He is a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society, a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, IAPR, IEEE, NAI, and OSA, and holds eight patents.