Venu Govindaraju

Dr. Venu Govindaraju, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is the founding director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors. He received his Bachelor’s degree with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1986, and his Ph.D. from UB in 1992. His research focus is on  machine learning and pattern recognition in the domains of Document Image Analysis and Biometrics.

Dr. Govindaraju has co-authored about 400 refereed scientific papers. His seminal work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the US Postal Service. He was also the prime technical lead responsible for technology transfer to the Postal Services in US, Australia, and UK. He has been a Principal or Co-Investigator of sponsored projects funded for about 65 million dollars.

Dr. Govindaraju has supervised the dissertations of 35 doctoral students. He has served on the editorial boards of premier journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Biometrics Council Compendium.

Govindaraju is a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. He is the Associate Director of the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) since 1995 and the founding director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) since its inception in 2003.

Govindaraju has authored 5 edited books and 400 refereed publications that include 78 journal papers, 22 book-chapters, and 300 symposium/conference papers in pattern recognition theory and its applications.

Edited Books:

• Handbook of Statistics Vol 35: Cognitive Computing: Theory and Applications, V. V. Raghavan, V. Gudivada, V. Govindaraju, and C. R. Rao (eds.), Elsevier 2016 (in print).
• Handbook of Statistics Vol 33: Big Data, V. Govindaraju, V. V. Raghavan, and C. R. Rao (eds.), Elsevier 2016.
• Handbook of Statistics Vol 31: Machine Learning Theory and Applications, C. R. Rao & V. Govindaraju (eds.), Elsevier 2013.
• Multibiometrics for Human Identification, B. Bhanu & V. Govindaraju (eds.), Cambridge University Press 2011.
• Indic OCR- Document Recognition & Retrieval, V. Govindaraju & S. Setlur (eds.), Springer 2009.
• Biometrics: Sensors, Systems, and Algorithms, N. Ratha & V. Govindaraju (eds.), Springer 2007.

Editorial: Govindaraju serves on the editorial board of 10 premier journals including 3 IEEE transactions (IEEE-T-PAMI IEEE-T-SMC, IEEE-T-IFS) and IEEE Access. He is also the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Biometrics Council Compendium.

Conferences: Govindaraju has been the General (Co)Chair at 12 conferences/workshops including International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), Program (Co) Chair in 14 conferences/workshops including Biometrics: theory, Algorithms and Systems (BTAS) , and program chairs of numerous conferences that span both document analysis and biometrics areas.

Speaking: Govindaraju has given over a hundred invited talks, keynotes, plenaries and seminars, at prestigious venues including influential think tanks such as the NRC Intelligence Committee Workshop of the National Academy of Sciences where he presented on the topic of “Accelerated Discovery in the Era of Scientific Information Overload”.

Public service: Govindaraju has been on the advisory board of the Buffalo Niagara Enterprise, EngageClick Inc., Copanion Inc., and the International Graphonomics Society. He is currently the President of the IEEE Biometrics Council (2015–2017).