Al Hero, R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2011 Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the U-M Rackham Graduate School. Prof. Hero is an internationally recognized expert in the field of signal and image processing, an established leader in the professional community, and distinguished educator.

As a researcher, Prof. Hero has made fundamenal contributions to both the theory and application of signal and image processing within a broad range of problems that include image processing, communication networks and link technology methods, medical imaging, intelligent vehicular systems, bioinformatics, and flow cytometry. His impact in these areas rests in part on his tremendous ability to effectively collaborate with individuals of complementary yet distinct disciplines here at Michigan and around the world.

He has received best papers awards in several of these fields. These include a recent best paper award at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing for the paper, "Performance Bounds for Sparse Parametric Covariance Estimation in Gaussian Models," co-authored by A. Jung and Dr. F. Hlawatsch from the Vienna University of Technology, and Dr. S. Schmutzhard from the University of Vienna, Austria. He received a 2009 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award for the article, "Locating the nodes: cooperative localization in wireless sensor networks," co-authored by N. Patwari, J. N. Ash, S. Kyperountas, R. L. Moses, and N. S. Correal, and a Best Original Paper award from the journal, Clinical Cytometry, for the 2009 paper "Analysis of clinical flow cytometric immunophenotyping data by clustering on statistical manifolds: Treating flow cytometry data as high-dimensional objects," co-authored by co-authored by K. Carter, R. Raich, and U-M pathologists Dr. W. Finn and Dr. L. Stoolman.

An earlier IEEE Signal Processing Society best paper award, for the 1996 seminar paper, "Exploring Estimator Bias-Variance Tradeoffs using the Uniform CR Bound," co-authored by J. Fesser and M. Usman, has stood the test of time, having had broad impact in imaging applications and in statistics.

Prof. Hero has been a strong and valued mentor to his 35 PhD students and 13 post-doctoral researchers during his career at Michigan. Many have gone on to become leaders in their field. He continues to teach courses from the sophomore introductory level through advanced graduate level, and he is lead author of the book, Foundations and Application of Sensor Management (Springer 2008).

Throughout his career, Prof. Hero has been an active leader in the Signal Processing community, organizing conferences, leading workshops, serving on committees, while also serving in important capacities in government agencies and Michigan committees. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of IEEE (2009-2011) where he is Director of Division IX (Signals and Applications), and he previously served as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2006-07). He has received an IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award and the IEEE Third Millenium Medal. Prof. Hero has published more than 450 journal and conference papers, has 3 patents, and is a Fellow of IEEE.

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About the Award

The Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, sponsored by the U-M Rackham Graduate School, honors senior faculty who have consistently demonstrated outstanding achievements in the areas of scholarly research and/or creative endeavors, teaching and mentoring of students and junior faculty, service and a variety of other activities which have brought distinction to themselves and to the University of Michigan.

Prof. Hero will receive his award at a special ceremony October 6, 2011.

Posted April 1, 2011 by
Catharine June
EECS/ECE Communications Coordinator
cmsj@umich.edu or 734-936-2965