Prof. Al Bovik has been named the recipient of the 2017 Edwin H. Land Medal awarded by The Optical Society (OSA), co-sponsored by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). Al was recognized for “substantially shaping the direction and advancement of modern perceptual picture quality theory, and for energetically engaging industry towards transforming his ideas into global practice. The Edwin H. Land Medal "recognizes pioneering work empowered by scientific research to create inventions, technologies and products.”
The Edwin H. Land Medal was established in 1992 by OSA and IS&T to honor Edwin H. Land and to recognize his unique career as scientist, technologist, industrialist, humanist, and public servant.
Al Bovik holds the Cockrell Family Endowed Regents Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE). He is a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (UT ECE), the Wireless Networking and Communication Group (WNCG) and the Institute for Neuroscience (INS). His research interests include image and video processing, digital television and digital cinema, computational vision, and visual perception. He has published over 800 technical articles in these areas and holds several U.S. patents. His publications have been cited more than 60,000 times in the literature, his current H-index is over 90, and he is listed as a Highly-Cited Researcher by Thompson Reuters. His several books include the companion volumes The Essential Guides to Image and Video Processing (Academic Press, 2009).