Meet Ashok Veeraraghavan, Indian-Origin Techie Honoured With Top Texas Award

Indian-origin computer engineer Ashok Veeraraghavan has been felicitated with one of the highest academic honours in Texas—the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award. He is also a professor at George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University. 

The award is presented to rising researchers in the US state, by The Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology (TAMEST). 

Mr Veeraraghavan has been honoured with this prestigious award for his revolutionary imaging technology that seeks to make the invisible visible.

Let us take a look at who is Ashok Veeraraghavan:

• Ashok Veeraraghavan completed his  B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2002.
• He then moved to the US for his master's degree in electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland. He received the degree in 2004. Following this,  in 2008, Mr Veeraraghavan completed his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the same university.
• Before the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award, Mr Veeraraghavan was honoured with IEEE Fellow in 2022. 
• In 2017, he received the NSF Career Award and the Hershel M. Rich Invention Award.
• Mr Veeraraghavan has also co-developed FlatCam. It is a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces lenses in a traditional camera.

In a conversation with the news agency PTI, Ashok Veeraraghavan said, “I am delighted to receive this award. It is the recognition of the wonderful and innovative research that many students, postdocs and research scientists, in the computational imaging lab at Rice University have done over the last decade.”

Detailing about the work that honoured him with this prestigious award, Ashok Veeraraghavan said, “Most imaging systems today are designed in a way that does not take all these three things into account together; they are designed separately. Co-design opens up new degrees of freedom and allows us to achieve some imaging functionalities or performance capabilities that are otherwise not possible.”

Mr Veeraraghavan's research work provides solutions in imaging scenarios, wherein there is inaccessibility of the visualisation target because of the scattering of light.