Venu Govindaraju Bio

UB Vice President for Research and Economic Development

SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering

Director, Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS)

Venu Govindaraju is responsible for managing UB's research enterprise, university/industry relations and economic development, contributing to the economic and cultural vitality of New York State and around the world.

Govindaraju's research focuses on machine learning and pattern recognition and his seminal work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the U.S. Postal Service.

He has an extraordinary sponsored funding record, having been the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on roughly $65 million in research funding, including active awards from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and industrial sponsors such as Qualcomm and Raytheon BBN Technologies. Govindaraju holds a BS degree with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology, and MS and PhD degrees from UB.  

Globally recognized for his groundbreaking research, Govindaraju has received numerous honors, including the 2015 IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award from the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition. He holds four (4) patents and authored/co-authored about 400 scientific papers. He has served on the editorial boards of premier journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and is currently editor-in-chief of the IEEE Biometrics Council Compendium.

Govindaraju belongs to a select group of computer scientists named Fellows of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He is an Honorary Fellow of the AP Academy of Sciences, India, Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Association of Pattern Recognition, and the International Society of Optics and Photonics.

He also serves on several boards including: Hauptman-Woodward Institute; Buffalo Niagara Enterprise; Engage Click, CA; and Int. Graphonomics Society.

Professor Govindaraju's work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the United States Postal Service. For more information visit Pioneers in AI systems.